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Movie and music rantings from someone who should get out more.

This piece contains spoilers, although to be fair, I wouldn’t recommend reading anything about Suspiria before watching it for the first time. It’s best just to dive in…

A Little Prelude…

If you ask a horror fan what their all time favourite example of the genre is, there’s a very, very good chance it’ll be something they first watched in their childhood or adolescence, or at the very least, from a time when the horror film was more than just another genre. When it was something more primal, more instinctual. All of my favourite horrors are the ones I watched when I was sixteen years old or younger. None of them were films that I were legally allowed to watch at the time. I think this is important. I’m talking as someone from the UK, where films are given stricter age classifications than, say in the US, where the R-rating essentially legitimises a child watching something like Saw so long as they have an adult with them. For me, one of the core attractions/repulsions of a horror film is knowing you’re not supposed to watch it. It’s the forbidden fruit.

I had an early period in my life of being absolutely terrified of horror films – the mere thought of watching one was a no-no, and yet curiosity or circumstance sometimes got the better of me. I happened to stumble on to a Channel 4 screening of The Company of Wolves one Thursday night back in 1987 when I was six, and its impact on me was akin to experiencing a living nightmare. I lasted five minutes and ran upstairs. A few years later I, in an attempt to not seem too cowardly, braved a the terrestrial premiere of The Lost Boys with my family, watching as much of it as my nerves could handle before fleeing in terror two-thirds in. After being burned like that, I continued to avoid horror; the best I could muster was little acts of bravery like sneaking a peek at the covers of horror VHS tapes in my local rental shop, before quickly putting them back in their place as they scared me too much. The back covers of the first two Demons films were so scary that the thought of watching the actual films seemed unthinkable. The turning point was when I braved myself to revisit that earlier trauma of The Lost Boys, only to discover that not only did I make it through the whole film without fleeing but a part of me got a kick out of the scares. And that’s when it began.

Suddenly horror had an appeal.

And yes, I was too young to watch these films, but that didn’t really stop me. I suppose it helped if your local video shop is particularly lax on rules regarding age classification. The period of my life from around twelve to sixteen years was probably the purest for me in regards to watching horror films – no preconceptions, no cynicism or weariness towards the genre… just pure visceral cinema. Hellraiser, The Shining, The Omen, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween…good times. However, good times never last, and the older I got, the more aware I became of horror’s history, its acknowledged peaks and depths. I started getting picky, became more demanding. And then I started being able to watch horror films at the cinema because I was the right age, and while some of them were pretty effective, already I was becoming immune to the genre’s impact. It didn’t help that mainstream horror in the late nineties was pretty rubbish, with even the best ones so drenched in irony that it was difficult to truly lose yourself in them.

Looking for the ultimate horror rush is like looking for the lost chord or the lost ark, and even though many a great horror film can turn up and unnerve you, freak you out, make you jump or even linger long in the memory after you’ve left the cinema…. it just isn’t the same. I’m still longing for that special new film that will terrify me the way the horror films used to as a child, but is such a thing possible? I truly envy those who are still terrified of horrors, or those who have watched a million already and can still get a primal kick out of them. I suppose I can still replicate the buzz I got when I was younger today– for example, when watching horrors from the 70s and 80s that I never actually saw in my youth but nevertheless could have. I imagine myself having watched it in some alternate history, and here I just happen to be rewatching it. The similarities and tropes of horror films means that even if you haven’t seen a particular example literally, you kind of already have by the fact that it shares so much of its contemporaries’ DNA. For example, last year I endured all of the ‘classic’ era Friday the 13th films. Some of them were being watched for the first time, ones like Part 2 and The Final Chapter. And yet, even though they were newbies for me, they settled in very comfortably amongst the first film and Part 3 because to be honest, they’re all so bloody similar anyway. And it was a weird feeling, watching Part 2. I was getting nostalgic pleasure of watching something I had never seen before. Yet as much as I try and relive that old feeling, it’s still not the same as that earlier, purer time when I would approach these films with genuine trepidation.

Anyway, I digress…

The Greatest Horror of All Time?

Luckily, I managed to catch what I regard as the greatest horror of all time just as my ‘pure’ era of horror films was nearing its end, and that film was Suspiria. It was probably the last horror film that I remember being truly enraptured by. After this, the bar had been raised so high that nothing else could match it. Today, Suspiria is getting truly lavished upon – currently there are two different 4K remasterings doing the cinematic rounds, with debates online as to what is the purer distillation of the film. The film has been dissected, analysed, pored over and I’m addicted to all discussion of it. And yet, with each further analysis (and I’m contributing one more to the pile right here), we continue to move further and further away from that first viewing, arguably the most important one of the lot. But who can blame us for wanting to pore over Dario Argento (and co-writer Daria Nicolodi)’s masterpiece and want to try and understand this most beguiling of nightmares?

Suspiria is a remarkable film because even though it wasn’t the first horror film ever made (obviously), it often feels like the purest. I remember watching it for the first time and feeling as though this, at last, was the horror I had been waiting for, the one I had always dreaded and yet wanted. Time Out magazine absolutely nailed its appeal when they said that ‘it seemed like what horror films were like when you were too young to get into them’. Argento gave us the ultimate horror, the final word on the genre, and yet it is also not universally adored. His extreme approach by definition was always going to divide audiences, but then the best horror is in one way or another extreme. Make your horror film too polite, too mainstream, too mannered and you get The Sixth Sense, which I’m sure most people would agree is a fine film, but the fact that everybody seems to like it is a sign that it’s too safe, you know?

The first time I watched Suspiria was when it was re-released on video in the UK in widescreen and in a distinctly below-average transfer in the late nineties. I’m sure existing fans would have been happy enough with the fact that it was in its original ratio and was uncut, but the picture quality was distinctly blurry and unrefined. Yet I didn’t really notice at the time. So legendary in my mind was the reputation of Suspiria that its muddy picture seemed to be the point, as though I had discovered an ancient tome or crackly old 78 from olden times. If the picture had been too perfect I don’t think it would have got to me as much. What I do know for sure is that Suspiria is a classic of sound and vision. There is rarely anything mundane in its approach. Only some of the supporting performances and dialogue approach anything resembling banality. For the most part, it transcends the genre, in fact transcends 99 per cent of cinema, to become something truly spellbinding. It has been charged with accusations of incoherence and plotlessness. In regards to the latter, I honestly think a plot more complex than the one we get on screen would be too distracting. As for incoherence, the only thing I don’t understand about the film is why people would call it incoherent. Yes, there are moments of outright bizarreness (the piano wire room, for instance), but they totally work within the film’s logic. I don’t feel cheated or played about. Accusations of incoherence could arguably be levelled at Suspiria’s follow-up, Inferno, but I’ll delve into that another time. The plot of Suspiria is breathtakingly simple – any loose ends that one might notice aren’t really that important. There is only as much plot here as we need. Enough to fill up the space of a nightmare…

The First 15 Minutes…

Suzy Bannion (a wide-eyed, innocent but resourceful hero, perfectly portrayed by Jessica Harper) arrives in Freiberg, Germany in the middle of a vicious thunderstorm to stay at the dance academy where she’s due to study, but it turns out that her teachers have wicked, malevolent intentions… that’s all you really need to know really, and a re-telling of the plot’s minutiae here obviously does the film no real favours. This is something you need to experience first hand. You need to dive in, and few horrors do as magnificent a job as getting you right from the very beginning as Suspiria. The first fifteen or so minutes are pretty much legendary in horror circles for representing the essential apex of the genre. The thunderous percussion of Goblin’s music score gives us no quarter, building and building to a deafening peak before crashing into silence and then into the soundtrack’s most famous motif, the gentle but sinister music-box melody that rivals the immortal repetition of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme for sheer iconic creepiness.

As if not wanting to bother with boring things like plot exposition, a voice-over quickly tells us what we need to know and then we’re into the action – the elements are in full force, the colour-scheme is growing wild, the sense of dread and unease (beautifully evoked in seemingly innocuous things like the gears of an automatic door or a storm drain) and the quick ‘what was that??’ reflection of a deranged looking Argento in the cab’s inside window (see above), something I didn’t even notice during those early, blurry VHS viewings. The music meanwhile is building and building to an unbearable crescendo of madness, with hisses and taunts of ‘WITCH!!!’ from various Goblin members acting as a clear spoiler for those who don’t know what’s to come. In fact, despite far-out, more-or-less fantastical elements being present in earlier Argento films, Suspiria is his first out-and-out supernatural work, and as such there’s a chance that existing fans of his might not have been prepared for the new twist in his style. Indeed, it represents as much a staggering leap in Argento’s style from Deep Red as that had made from his relatively modest ‘Animal Trilogy’. I’d go as far to say that no director has managed to deliver what Argento did with this film.

Now, even if Suzy had arrived at the ‘Tanzakademie’ and been let inside for a much-need night’s rest with no drama, this still have made for a mightily impressive introduction, but Argento’s not done with us, even if he is temporarily done with Suzy. No, instead we switch to Pat, the doomed student whom we later find out knows far too much about her teachers for her to be able to make it through the night. For many, this is where Suspiria really gets going. She seeks sanctuary in her flat, which is located in a remarkable tenement that boasts a wild glass ceiling, outrageously ornate lifts and utterly bizarre internal geography. It’s like that bit in that Shining documentary where it’s revealed that the manager’s office has a window to the outside world that couldn’t possibly exist, given the layout of the building. Pat and her room mate are then murdered in an astonishingly protracted and brutal act of directorial malevolence that is as horrifying as it is spectacular.

The build up is unbearable: Goblin’s soundtrack descends on Pat as she fruitlessly tries to peek through her window to see what’s outside with the aid of a lamp, only to be faced with her own reflection, as well as those weird eyes staring back at her… and then… quiet. Oh God, what’s going to happen?

This.

An arm, which could belong to an ogre, or something Neanderthal, smashes through the window and pushes Pat’s face hard up against the pane in front of her, not stopping until her head smashes through it. The music has come back with a vengeance, the percussion pummelling us into submission. Then we start to lose our sense of perspective as Pat appears to be now in an attic (?) – a jump in location which, yes, you could regard as incoherent, but I love it for its bad-dream logic.

Then we get a dozen or so stabbings when one or two might have done the trick, including a shot of her punctured heart, which is still beating and still getting stabbed. Then, seemingly for no other reason than for the killer (and Argento) to show off, Pat has a noose tied around her neck, then she’s placed on top of the glass ceiling and she smashes through it, falling until the noose hangs her. We then cut to what is essentially a grand summation of all the chaos that has just transpired – we slowly pan down Pat’s bloodied body, we see that the shattered, fallen ceiling glass has killed her room mate. The music, made up of a creepy, sepulchral synthesiser, surveys the damage, and then we cut to the next morning.

Wow.

The Rest of the Film

That opening act reaches heights that most horrors in their final act couldn’t hope to rival, and it’s terrifying to realise that the film has only just begun! We return to Suzy and her eventual misadventures at the dance academy, which as we all know (and love), involve maggots, cut throat razors, scary snoring, wild wallpaper, very white teeth, possessed doggies, blue irises, and even (in a nice nod to an earlier Argento film) a crystal plumage, all presented in glorious, vivid colours and backed by the most gloriously wild music. We all have our favourite moments from this film, and I’d like to delve into a few of them. Three in particular, although to be honest, the last example lasts well over ten minutes.

1. “We’ll all sleep together…”

It’s been revealed that Suspiria was originally meant to feature children in the lead roles, but upon realising this would be a tricky road to carry on down given the story’s vicious content, the ages of the characters were bumped up to what I presume are early twenties, although the film sneakily still manages to exude a childlike feel by doing this like making the doorknobs higher than normal so that the adult actors would have to reach up to use them, by casting Harper with her afore-mentioned innocent visage, by avoiding any sexual overtones, and simply by emphasising the boarding school atmosphere of the academy. This is most evident in a deeply strange sequence where, after the upper floors of the Tanzakademie are revealed to have been infested with maggots, the students are made to sleep together ina big hall with hastily arranged makeshift beds. I slept in a set-up just like this when I was a boy spending a week away on a trip with my local Cubs group, and it’s a weird atmosphere, like camping but indoors. Thankfully I didn’t have a demonic directress snoring the snores of the damned next to me, but it was still an unusual feeling, everybody together like that, sharing sleeping space with all these other people. Plus there was the size of the hall which, when crammed with all these other children, made for an intimate yet at the same time cavernous setting.

Watching Suspiria, especially this scene, evokes these feelings of childhood, but an evil, twisted version. The students bicker, tease and pout just like kids, and Harper and Stefania Casini (as Suzy’s new friend Sara) in particular do very well in acting as though they were adolescent best friends, with their hushed whispers as they try not to be overheard, their fear of adults, in particular the ghastly, monstrous one just behind them. Okay, you could quibble at the totally unrealistic red hue the scene has been bathed in, or why the directress is sleeping in such close proximity to the students, but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. What Suspiria does so well is present its absurdities in such a persuasive manner that I never feel like questioning them.

2. “Suzy, wake up!”

Another remarkable scene is the stalking and eventual murder of Sara a cruelly drawn out set-piece that you know it going to end particularly horribly. It’s just a matter of how horrible. It’s unusual for a lead character to be so passive, but Suzy does spend a fair amount of the film drugged and/or out of the picture, and it’s when Sara needs her the most, when she realises that the witches are on to her, that Suzy ultimately fails her, drifting off to sleep, blissfully unaware of the killer’s presence when he/she walks past her sleeping in bed. Sara runs off on her own, deeper into the labyrinth of the academy, up to the attic where the maggots were previously taking up residence. There’s a terrific, understated scare when a door behind her opens out of the blue (talking of blue, the lighting in this sequence is beautifully vivid), an the wait for inevitable attack becomes unbearable. There’s even a return of those spooky eyes from the first scene lurking in the background, something I never even noticed in the blurry-VHS days. When the killer does attack (we never see their face, but given we see him with Sara’s lighter later on, it’s most likely the mute, ugly servant Pavlo, a revelation all the more disturbing given the film treated him as a figure of fun earlier), it’s a swift, brutal act that is dragged out even more than Pat’s demise, as Sara actually manages to temporarily evade death, having locked herself in a room. Much is made of the film’s remarkable score, but there’s a moment when it stops and all we hear is the ghastly scraping of the killer’s razor as he attempts to lift up the latch of the door with it, and this is where the adrenaline of the scene, emphasises by the music, is drained away and a very real dread seeps in, a horror of knowing that this character is definitely not going to make it.

This scene plays out like a very bad dream, with a ridiculously inaccessible, small window the only means of escape. Sara does make it out, but if there ever was a textbook horror film definition of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’, then this is it. We all know what happens next, and it is a reveal so outrageous that I am genuinely amazed that I didn’t think it utterly preposterous at the time. Instead it was so shocking, and the suspense leading up to it so effective that, frankly, there could have been anything in that room and I would have bought it.

3. “She must die…”

The curious, albeit immortal, marketing for Suspiria declared that the only thing more frightening than the last twelve minutes of this film were the first ninety, a memorable tagline for sure, but clearly one that suggested the ending of the film was going to be a let-down! For some, the ending is a bit anticlimactic, but each to their own. For me, the ending is a brilliant culmination of a gradual, increasingly unbearable escalation of terror. Suzy is all alone in the academy, with all the other students and staff having apparently ‘gone to the theatre’, which is the kind of way a bad dream would start – the sense of being left out, the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of friends, being alone in what is essentially a haunted house. Alone in her room, illuminated in the kind of blue darkness that doesn’t exist in real life but looks utterly, spookily beautiful nonetheless, Suzy is attacked by a bat, its incongruous presence actually kind of understandable in a film like this. After that she decides to do a little investigating, cannily working out the secret route to the witches’ lair by correctly recalling the half-heard clue that was said to her by Pat at the start of the film. Suspiria continues Argento’s tradition of a detective struggling with their memory to try and solve the big mystery, although in the case of this film, we actually get as close to a happy ending as is possible in the director’s canon, a rare instance of the mystery being unravelled but the character managing not to be unravelled themselves, though admittedly it’s an ordeal to get to that ending.

When Suzy turns the ‘secret, blue iris’, a little door opens and one of my favourite moments in any horror film begins. I’m talking about the golden corridor that Suzy walks down – in any other scenario, this would actually be quite a beautiful scene. It looks tranquil, regal and yet… we know where we are. This is the calm before the storm, and I find this corridor utterly creepy as a result. It doesn’t belong here, much like a lot of things in this film. There’s a bit just before the room with the iris when Suzy sneaks past a kitchen where two maids (who are in on the witches’ scheme and are not to be trusted) are laughing happily and going about their business, and it’s such a jolt to see these people who are privy to murder and evil being so jolly. Also, at the very start of the film, as Suzy tries to hail a cab, we see a McDonalds in the background. The thought of people cheerfully enjoying their Big Mac, so near yet so far to this demonic story sends shivers down me. You’d think that the sight of the golden arches would snap you out of Suspiria’s spell, but I think it enhances it. There’s so many classic instances of weird, unusual touches in this film – the bat, the out-of-nowhere lighting, that where-are-we?-attic from the opening murder… I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but Suspiria takes dream logic and applies it so seamlessly to the art of film that it’s no wonder that Argento went even further in Inferno, but there I find it too distracting and showy, and I can’t lose myself in it, despite the film’s many, many virtues.

Suzy then sees the staff, who are definitely not at the theatre (so where are the other students?) and are in fact preparing to cast a spell to bring sickness and death upon Suzy. This marks the first time we have actually seen characters who we have suspected to be evil committing acts of evil. Everything so far has been acted out by anonymous characters whose identity is only possible to gauge in retrospect. Deep down we knew these characters were bad, but here is the proof. Even worse than that is the moment where we see Sara’s corpse, laid out as a grisly tableaux in a room that Suzy backs off into. Her once alive friend, now a grotesque with pins in her eyes and nails in her wrists. This room is the room, the most terrible room in a terrible house, the sleeping quarters of the directress, one Helena Markos, the Black Queen and, as we discover in Inferno, one of the legendary Three Mothers who wish to bring darkness, tears and sorrow upon the world. Suzy accidentally disturbs Markos (there’s a wonderful shot as the ornamental balls Suzy has knocked over head inevitably, unstoppably towards her bed) and the unthinkable happens – she awakens. When I first watched this, the tension was horrible.

Now it’s true, the long-awaited confrontation between Suzy and Markos is short, but boy, is it deliciously sickly. The voice of Markos in the dubbed version might sound to some as very hammy, but she scared the fuck out of me when I was younger, and her promise to Suzy that she’s ‘going to meet death…the living dead!’ is one of the genre’s most chilling moments, as is the earlier line ‘Hell is behind that door!’ What happens next is a moment scarier than anything in the film’s more celebrated opening 15 minutes, as an undead Sara walks in, brandishing a knife, bleeding from the mouth and laughing maniacally. I’ve written before about the ultimate horror of a kind, good or heroic character turning bad, and the terror of when that person wants to hurt or even kill their former friend, loved one or relative, and while Sara’s return from the dead only lasts a few moments, it’s enough for it to leave a lasting, chilling impact. Yep, in swift time, Suzy dispatches Markos and successfully escapes from the now self-destructing academy, after which the film ends with her relieved, laughing and walking away from the burning building, from which we can hear the screams of the doomed staff. Roll credits.

You have been watching Suspiria…

And that’s that. Suspiria. Is it the greatest horror film ever, like I boldly claimed earlier? It’s all personal, isn’t it? What I find scary, others won’t. What other people find scary, I won’t. I mean horror, of all things, is so difficult to calmly, analytically rate. What I’m confident of is my opinion that Suspiria, more than any other film, captures the essence of what makes a horror great. So even if it isn’t officially the greatest horror film, it is the film that encapsulates best of all what it is that makes a horror film a horror film. Did that make sense?

Okay, it has dated in some respects. If you were feeling picky, you could point out the obvious use of a model dog’s head when the doomed, blind pianist Daniel’s erstwhile beloved mutt has his snack. Yeah, I guess Sara’s slit neck looks a bit, well… rubbery, I suppose? The clearly exaggerated red of the blood, although obviously an aesthetic choice to match the outrageous splendour of the surroundings, might turn off those who like their grue more realistic. Some of the dubbing is undeniably distracting, most obviously in the case of Pat and her room mate, and bitchy fellow student Olga too.

Ah yes, the dubbing. Normally, I avoid dubbed versions of films like the plague, but for a long time Suspiria was only ever available here in the UK in its English language incarnation, and with it came the natural awkwardness of not-quite right lip-sync, weird dialogue and not quite natural ambience. Oddly, like many Argento films, some of the actors on set were actually speaking in English, and others in Italian, and then everything was re-dubbed afterwards, so even performers like Harper, Alida Valli and Joan Bennett sound slightly strange. We all had to make do with the English version for a long time, but to be honest, such is the all-encompassing visual and aural assault of the film that I genuinely feel subtitles would be a distraction from all those sights and sounds.

So to conclude, even though Argento would go on to make a very good film later on called Opera, Suspiria is genuinely operatic, a visceral assault of crescendos and high-impact spectacle that can arguably be regarded as the most musical of all horrors. In the same way that the precise impact of a piece of music can be difficult to define, so too is Suspiria’s power tricky to convey. Of course, its technical virtues are easy to applaud, but the other stuff, the stuff that crawls under your skin, gets into your head and invades your dreams… well, that’s magic. That’s Suspiria.

PS: If you would like to listen to an audio commentary for Suspiria recorded by me and my good friend Mark, then click on the commentaries link to the right of the page and download the free Suspiria track. Enjoy!

Now that’s a masterplan, and Felt mainman Lawrence, the singer and songwriter who wished his life could be as strange as a conspiracy, pretty much delivered on his promise and defined 1980’s indie with a remarkable run of glorious music that, once discovered, is difficult to resist.

You just gotta find it, that’s all.

I imagine many after-the-fact Felt fans came to them via their sixth album, 1986’s Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, a stellar collection of guitar/organ pop that was jinglier and janglier than a 4-day-weekend Byrds convention. However, if you were to scan your pop lists/Best Albums of the 80s/critic polls and whatnot, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the only Felt album worth raving about. When you later discover that there was more – a lot more – to love, you may, like me, wonder how you got on without any of it.

The musical sound of Felt can be preciously delicate, thrillingly melodic, spaciously epic, charmingly ramshackle, unpredictably contrary and even frustratingly wayward. As well as Lawrence, there were two major creative forces in the band, both of whom were just as essential to their sound, guitarist Maurice Deebank and organist Martin Duffy. Deebank was part of Felt for the first half of their existence, Duffy the second, with only one album out of the ten featuring both of them together. The Deebank and Duffy eras are both unique – the odds are that you may end up pledging allegiance to one over the other, even if you do kinda love both periods to bits. For me, it’s the Deebank years that I truly, truly adore, but the Duffy era is also so very special, so very wonderful indeed.

As for the vocals, well Lawrence has the kind of delivery that’s sometimes a little Tom Verlaine (the band’s name was inspired by his pronunciation of the word in Television’s killer song ‘Venus’), sometimes a little Bob Dylan, sometimes a little Lou Reed, and yet it’s also own thing entirely, a non-macho, non-histrionic and lovably unconventional voice that’s laconic yet heartfelt, and best of all, given that his is not the most soaring or professional of singers, delightfully easy to sing along with! His lyrics could be gorgeously poetic, opaque, allusive, self-deprecating, self-doubting, wryly funny, sad, beautiful and epic. Not bad, eh?

As for Felt’s rhythm section, firstly there was Gary Ainge on drums – he would be the longest serving member of the band outside of Lawrence – if it was a Felt record and it had a beat, he was playing it. Notably, his drums remained cymbal-less for the first few years. It wasn’t until the third album when the percussion lightened up a bit! The role of the bassist was a lot more fluid, with at least six different players taking up the challenge over Felt’s lifetime. We had Nick Gilbert, Mick Lloyd, Marco Thomas, future Lush member Phil King, Mick Bund and Primal Scream’s Robert Young, all of them essential elements of the band’s sound. Sadly, both Micks and Robert Young are no longer with us.

Regarding the music, what’s strange about Felt is that at times their development appears to advance significantly and then at others retreat to an approach so perversely lo-fi that you’d struggle to fit the LPs and singles in chronological sequence if all you had was the music to go by. A later album like The Pictorial Jackson Review and a single like ‘Ballad of the Band’ sound deliberately rough, ready and almost debut-release quality, whereas LPs like The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories or The Splendour of Fear sound beautifully rich and full of texture. The only thing that makes sense in this band’s chronology is that the very first thing released under the Felt name sounds so primitive that it’s like the cassette demo had already been chewed up and spat out, while the very last thing they released sounds consummately professional. In-between we’re all over the place.

They barely made a dent in the charts. True, their single ‘Primitive Painters’ was a UK Indie Chart #1, but the radio wasn’t listening. Other factors interfered with their potential success, some outside their control (the NME pulling a cover feature at the last minute), some bizarrely at their own hands (deciding to follow their biggest single with a quirky instrumental LP with zero commercial potential), and of course, there were those verbose album titles, but as much as Lawrence did, and still does, desire fame and success, part of Felt’s appeal lies in their obscurity. They are a buried treasure, a lost find, a beloved cult band. Of course, it would have been nice for the band to have actually sold albums so that they could pay the rent with more ease, but it wasn’t to be. What follows is an album-by-album breakdown of their ten year lifetime, as well as the compilations which gathered various singles and B-sides.

Not really the First Single: ‘Index’

This is about as rough and low-budget a single as you’re ever likely to hear. Upon first listen both sides (the B-side is named ‘Break It’) sound like an unholy racket. Upon second listen they still sound like an unholy racket. If you’re willing to give them time, and I can understand why you wouldn’t, then something barely resembling a melody lies underneath these ‘songs’. Hilariously, ‘Index’ was included on the Absolute Classic Masterpieces compilation, though politely it was tucked away at the very end. Sounds magazine gave it the ‘Single of the Week’ award though, in what I imagine must have been act of wilful perversity. By the way, these are solo recordings before the ‘band’ Felt were formed.

The Proper First Single: ‘Something Sends Me to Sleep’

This is a remarkable step forward – the fuzziness of their debut now has an added beat, a recognisable vocal and a loping, sexy, hypnotic melody that I read somewhere was essentially ‘Index’ but with all the feedback and static removed. You know, as though ‘Index’ was the slab of marble and this is the beautiful sculpture that was always there inside. It’s not quite commercial, but it is totally beguiling. This is also the first time we have Lawrence singing. What he’s singing about is another matter entirely. Another version can be found on the B-side which features the kind of galloping drums that were a big element of the first two albums. The other flipside is the brief instrumental ‘Red Indians’, which would be re-recorded with slightly better results for the second album. This early take is well worth your time though.

The First Album: Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty

Felt’s full-length debut is small yet epic, intimate yet sprawling. It sounds like it was made for little money and yet it sounds spectacularly ambitious and wholly successful as an attempt to create something unique, elemental and otherworldly. It is an album that stretches out for miles and yet sometimes feels as though it never leaves the bedroom. Just four people in a room, weaving sounds together, possibilities infinite. It’s one of the most beguiling debuts from any band ever. If they had never done anything else after this, the mystery of this album would have been fascinating. Its place near the beginning of the band’s existence can sometimes serve to underrate it, especially given that the next two albums were even better, but Crumbling… has a special power that’s all its own. It’s difficult to go into detail about what precisely is so appealing about this album. It’s fragile, ebbing and gentle yet strident – it has a beat and it has bass, yet it always seems like it’s going to disappear between your fingers. It’s definitely the most spectral and mysterious of the ten Felt albums.

The production is very light and delicate, whilst Lawrence’s vocals and lyrics are blended into the musical mix so much that it’s sometimes quite difficult to hear what he’s actually singing. I don’t mind this obscuration at all though. After all, I love the Cocteau Twins (with whom Felt would later share the odd collaboration) and that’s what they were all about too. Upon first listen, it might not make a strong impression; it certainly doesn’t have the immediate punch of their later work, but believe me, it’s a real grower. Besides, this isn’t really the sort of thing that grabs you by the collar and demands attention. It exists very happily in its own universe, waiting for you to come along sometime and visit. Once you’re in, you’ll be glad you gave it the time. Interestingly, Felt’s early manifesto was to deliver stand-alone killer pop singles alongside atmospheric, mainly instrumental albums. They’d soon abandon that process, but for the first few years, it made for a fascinating approach, satisfying both their pop and art impulses.

Occasionally, the album becomes surprisingly urgent, like on the edgy, thrilling “I Worship the Sun”. The drums and bass rumble and close in, Lawrence murmur-sings his lyrics, never trying to steal the sunlight from Deebank’s astonishing flourishes of guitar. It fits in with the rest of the album very nicely, but it also has an unrelenting tension that threatens to shatter the track into pieces. Not for nothing does the song become so tightly coiled that it has no choice but to break the spell halfway through, spreading its wings and slowly ebbing away into a shimmering echo….before building up again towards one sudden finish. Deebank’s guitars here ripple like water – quite like The Edge’s stuff from around this time, but more elemental and less tied to the pop format. Hypnotic, utterly, addictively hypnotic.

‘I Worship the Sun’ excepted, Crumbling… is an airy, brisk and spacious experience. The production is a little thin, but I think that contributes to the crystalline, precious sound. The guitars of Lawrence and Deebank are the star of the show, and they sparkle, glimmer and languidly drift through the likes of “Evergreen Dazed” and “Birdmen” in particular. “Fortune” is really lovely, but it would take a re-recorded version later on to elevate it to the level of true classic. This early version is sparser, less grand, one that might seem a little unfinished compared to the later re-recording, but it works wonderfully in the context of this album. Their next LP would take this sound (especially the frisky, galloping rhythms on the last three tracks) and make it even stronger, but this is nevertheless a special, unique debut….maybe not the most ideal introduction to this most wonderful of bands, but one definitely worth getting if you love their next two albums in particular…

The Second Single: ‘My Face is on Fire’

‘My Face is on Fire’ (great title) introduces Felt’s love of the Spanish guitar to their sound, but Lawrence obviously wasn’t that keen on the song given that it was re-recorded for the third album and when it came to selecting highlights for Absolute Classic Masterpieces, they chose the B-side over this! Speaking of that flipside, ‘Trails of Colour Dissolve’ shares a lot of its big brother’s DNA. They’re both sprightly, claustrophobic and passionate pop gems, edging the band closer to a radio-friendly sound. It wasn’t a hit at all, but the lo-fi approach meant that its obscurity was understandable. The failure of the next single was less justified however…

The Third Single: ‘Penelope Tree’

Holy shit.

Despite the melodic appeal of ‘Something Sends Me to Sleep’ and ‘My Face is on Fire’, this is the first genuinely legitimate perfect pop song Felt gave us. I can even imagine being played on the radio! It’s about as excellent as your killer three-minute pop charge gets. The sound of Crumbling… is left to… well, crumble, right from the opening guitar siren (as cute and as mischievous as a kitty-cat), which immediately ducks for cover in the shadow of a stunning Lawrence tour de force that doesn’t let up for a second. It was created when Deebank had temporarily left the band, so the composition is all Lawrence, although I cannot ignore the stellar band performance – a brilliant, brilliant rhythm section on this one. The urgency of the acoustic guitar carries us through the verses, but then a magnificently exciting electric flourish in the bridge takes it all into the stratosphere. Hooks, flourishes, heart-stopping moments from start to finish.

The B-sides on the flip are a couple of utterly beautiful instrumentals – further down the line ‘A Preacher in New England’ and ‘Now Summer’s Spread Its Wings Again’ would be melded into one piece and released simply as ‘A Preacher in New England’ for The Splendour of Fear, but here is how it sounded originally. The production is less all-enveloping, somewhere in-between the thinner sound of Crumbling… and the full-fat widescreen of Splendour. Also, the melody on ‘Now Summer’s Spread Its Wings Again’, whilst initially resembling the later version, blossoms into its own uniquely delicate tune for a while before returning to theme more familiar to fans of Splendour. The 12″ of ‘Penelope Tree’ is the way to go, as the 7″ only features ‘A Preacher in New England’ and frankly, that’s not enough.

The Second Album: The Splendour of Fear

Terrifically dark, atmospheric and lusciously romantic, this is a short LP, just clocking in at over half-an-hour, but damn it if I don’t love it for its brevity. Six tracks, and only two featuring vocals (and even one of them ditches the vocals pretty early on), it is one of the best examples of less being more. It’s a wonderfully exquisite, perfect creation, and it’s all about one mood, and one mood only. What that mood is exactly is quite difficult to pinpoint, but I guess you could call it a kind of moody, cinematic, romantic melancholia? It plays out like the long-lost score to some long-lost Western-noir, its emphasis on instrumentation over lyrics permitting you to let your imagination run riot over the epic vistas hinted at throughout. The front cover directly uses the poster for Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, but to be honest it’s the cover for The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories which feels like a more appropriate image for this album’s contents. Ancient, elemental, mysterious. Prepare to be seduced.

The opening track, ‘Red Indians’ feels like an overture, as though opening credits could be playing along with it, a scene where horses and their riders are coming into town. You can practically smell the dust from the plains seeping through the speakers. The drums rumble, the bass trembles and the guitar fills the air languidly but at the same time stridently allows the picture to widen and widen until before you is a full plain vista. It’s moody, magnificent and so far away from what you’d expect from that kind of low-budget 80’s indie. The only ‘proper’ song follows, the gorgeous ‘The World is Soft as Lace’, and it’s one of the most delightfully romantic, dreamy songs of the 80’s, embellished by Deebank’s delightful, sensual guitar hook which might be the textbook definition of `sparkling’. Two huge instrumentals dominate proceedings. Lawrence’s “The Optimist and the Poet” stretches out forever, and I wouldn’t want it any other way….this is real widescreen music, panoramic in scope yet not in the slightest bit bloated or extraneous….just close your eyes and fall deep into the visions created here. The same goes for “The Stagnant Pool”, which remains a fan favourite, and it’s easy to see why; it’s like swimming at night, bathed in moonlight.

‘Mexican Bandits’ kicks off Side 2 in much the same way as ‘Red Indians’ did for Side 1, but it’s longer, more forceful and really quite thrilling. It makes me want to get on a horse and ride into town just like its title characters. Deebank conjures up an insistent jangle-riff that gets under your skin. The final track is one of the most haunting yet eventually glorious pieces of music you may ever hear. As previously mentioned, this was originally split up into two tracks on the B-side of the ‘Penelope Tree’ 12”, and the Fear re-recording brings its beautiful melodies and atmospherics up-to-date. The first half is so utterly, eerily dreamy and intoxicatingly sad that it does more for glamourising melancholia than most bands could ever dream of, and the reason for that is that there’s something mysteriously sensual and intimate about the spell it weaves. Then, suddenly, the sun breaks through the clouds and what’s this? Honestly, what follows is one of the most wonderful stretches of music you’ll ever hear, and Deebank confirms his status as One of the Gods, truly one of the best guitarists ever, with melodies spinning off into thrilling, delicate crescendos and all of a sudden everything so, so utterly, utterly right with the world. Deebank’s obscurity is to me utterly heartbreaking, for the man was a genius, and he should be praised far more than he is.

The Fourth Single: ‘Mexican Bandits’

No unique tracks to this single, so let’s move on.

The Fifth Single: ‘Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow’

We get a single-ready take on a dazzling future album track which here has its moments, but is somewhat overcooked. Whereas the later take has a simple, irresistible charm, the single take throws in ripe strings and some badly misjudged female backing vocals that frankly make it all a bit of mess, but not the kind of giddying, often thrilling mess that the overloaded Ignite the Seven Cannons would be. The only appealing difference is the fantastic intro, which starts off with just the bass and then a killer guitar and drum hook. There’s an instrumental version called ‘Sunlight Strings’ on the flip that emphasises the strings and is a lot less cluttered. In fact, it’s quite fantastic, letting the orchestration breathe a lot more, giving it the kind of grandeur the Bunnymen achieved on their tremendous Ocean Rain album from the same year.

However, even better than ‘Sunlight Strings’ is theother B-side, and when I say ‘even better’, I mean ‘so much better than it’s even better than the very best Felt and could be the greatest damn thing they ever gave us’. Yep, that good. I’m talking about the re-recording of ‘Fortune’. Originally a delicate, pretty song on the debut album, now a fully-fleshed, achingly lovely thing of utter, mesmerising beauty, the new ‘Fortune’ boasts one of the most gloriously luscious guitar lines in all of pop. Evocative of sultry summer evenings and dreamy sunsets and exuding a truly sexy, luscious atmosphere, I’d say the song boasts Deebank’s most beautiful guitar playing. It’s definitely home to Lawrence’s most haunting vocal. This song is sensual, sad, seductive, sparkling and so ridiculously sweet that if I was pushed to recommend a single song to turn a complete stranger to Felt on to their music, then I’d go with this one. Yep, even more than ‘Primitive Painters’, more than ‘The World is Soft as Lace’, more than anything from Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. It’s better than almost anything else I’ve ever heard in modern music….it’s a song to fall in love to, and with.

Back to ‘Sunlight’ though – there’s an alternative take of it out there that keep the cool intro but ditches the strings and backing vocals and ends up a little closer to the album version but is still different enough to make it a true alternate version. In fact, my ideal 12″ would have been to have ‘Fortune’ as the A-side and this sparser take of ‘Sunlight’ and ‘Sunlight Strings’ as the B-sides. But that’s the occasionally frustrating world of Felt for you. Doesn’t always go the way you want.

The Third Album: The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories

Okay, let me take a deep breath….and here we go.

What an album.

When one discovers the wonders of this LP, it’s like discovering buried treasure….and it’s yours, all yours! The later Forever Breathes the Lonely Word is rightfully applauded as a melodic classic, but this is at the very least its equal. Actually, I think I like it more. Its obscurity in the pop world is maddening. I mean, the likes of ‘Spanish House’, ‘Roman Litter’ and ‘Dismantled King is Off the Throne’ are hidden gems of astounding quality and beauty and the thing is, they could have been hits! They are examples of what I rate as “perfect songs”, in that every single second of each is a total delight; they have killer melodies, great lyrics, and that indescribable magic when a band just play off each other and create a swirling rush of a tune. Of course, the rhythm section is unbeatable, but the real stars are Lawrence and Deebank, who both weave spellbinding textures, sounds and feelings from their chemistry together; Deebank delivers a spectacular array of delectable melodies, while Lawrence’s wonderfully languid vocals and clever, witty lyrics are showcased better than ever before on `Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow’ and `Crystal Ball’. One of the most overlooked albums of all time, The Strange Idols… is a truly, maddeningly delightful experience.

Let’s go back to some of those highlights – ‘Roman Litter’ is a terrific opener. It eases you in the LP, takes you by the hand and skips along with its insistent yet easy-going beat. Oh yes, we have cymbals on a Felt record! As soon as you hear this song, you know you’re in good hands. The warmth of the playing, and John Leckie’s production is bright, bouncy and evidence of Felt’s new willingness to make their albums as accessible as their singles. ‘Sempiternal Darkness’ is a solo instrumental, and one of Deebank’s most precious, glittering moments. It’s beautiful, so pretty, so out-of-time and sad, so elegant. ‘Spanish House’ effortlessly found its way into my top 5 Felt songs of all time as soon as I heard it. It’s stupendously catchy. It gets everything right. I mean, spectacularly right. One listen and I was absolutely sold. As if I needed further evidence that Felt were genius, then this comes along and just wins me over to such an overwhelming degree that I realise that the public and the radio’s loss was our gain. I envy those who have yet to discover this gem. It makes me smile. I hope it does the same for you. I still can’t quite work out what the song’s actually about though. References to ‘galleon seas’ and televisions and whatnot. ‘Imprint’ is a Lawrence solo piece – very lovely indeed, like the rising sun coming through the windows of your bedroom.

The best version of ‘Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow’ follows – less overdone than the earlier single take, and more in keeping with the sound of the rest of this album. Great lyrics on this one – there’s rarely been a more example of faint praise than ‘I thought your poetry was…. sometimes good’. I’ve mean meaning to read Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell ever since hearing this song, even if I’m afraid I’m not going to know what it’s about. The beautiful ‘Vasco de Gama’ (one of two Felt tracks named after Mexican conquistadors) kicks off the second side – more unfolding melodies that blossom like flowers, really very pretty indeed. Frustratingly, apart from the 1989 release which combined this album with Ignite the Seven Cannons, all CD versions to date omit a Deebank instrumental piece entitled “Crucifix Heaven” which originally followed ‘Vasco de Gama’. It’s a brilliant, Spanish guitar-influenced piece which really does belong back on this album. Why wasn’t it included? Apparently, Lawrence isn’t keen on it; if that’s true, that’s a poor excuse for exclusion! After that we get the incredible ‘Dismantled King is Off the Throne’, which gets 10/10 for that title alone. An absolutely breathless, non-stop rush of melody, this is one song that I really, really, really, really wish had been a hit. To be fair, it wasn’t even released as a single, so I should stop pining, but damn there are few songs as fantastic as this one. It’s remarkably stirring for a song that opens with wondering what’s better: ‘a life of misery or an awful suicide’. ‘Crystal Ball’ mellows things considerably, a glorious thing if ever I heard one. The closing ‘Whirlpool Vision of Shame’ is a re-recording of ‘My Face is on Fire’ and it’s a fine alternative. Neither take is considerably better or worse than the other, though if you can’t get enough of Deebank, then you may find yourself preferring this one.

The Strange Idols.., if it had just been the only album from any given artist, might have been given relatively more attention as a indie masterpiece from a lost artist, but because this is Felt, and whenever Felt is mentioned it’s always ‘Primitive Painters’ and/or Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, it means that this album is getting even less attention than it deserves. I truly think that not only is it Felt’s masterpiece, and not only is one of the best albums of the eighties, it is one of the best albums of all time. Everything clicked on this one, everything seemed bright on this album, everything felt as golden as sunlight’s glow. The band would still remain brilliant, but for me this and ‘Fortune’ are their peaks. If only ‘Fortune’ had been on this album too, then it could have been even better…

PS: The upcoming 2018 CD release will re-instate ‘Crucifix Heaven’, which is great news!

The Sixth Single: ‘Primitive Painters’

The band’s biggest hit, a UK Independent Chart #1 (didn’t crack the regular charts, sadly) and a bona fide collaboration with two of the Cocteau Twins, this is an epic, six-minute whirlwind of wonder. The producer was Robin Guthrie, whose distinctive approach made the Cocteaus one of the most addictive, multi-coloured, tactile and sensual bands of the Eighties – there are those who balked at what he did with Felt, that he added too many layers and made everything a mess in the process, but I love what he did. If Felt were a more commercial prospect, an album like Ignite the Seven Cannons might have warranted a deluxe edition and the thing could have been given some kind of de-Guthrie-isation that would strip it of all of its excesses and we could have been treated to an alternate version, but I say stick with what we’ve got. Besides, one thing that I think all of us Felt fans are in agreement with is that ‘Primitive Painters’ is a total success. Their most anthemic song, notable for the presence of Elizabeth Fraser, who joins Lawrence on the awesome chorus and pretty much from the half-way point onwards as the song begins its long finale. It’s a beautiful thing, going round and round and working its way to an ecstatic headrush. A six minute swim in glorious waters, `Primitive Painters’ is a euphoric, shimmering and very atmospheric masterpiece of 1980’s indie pop which still sounds glorious to this day. For the first and last time, Felt sound truly collaborative, stepping outside of their world and into a bigger one, and for a moment it was glorious.

The B-side is a reworking of ‘Cathedral’ from their first album. There’s more oomph this time, notably with the drums. You could argue that it’s a bit pointless, and the fragility of the original has been vanquished, but I like to think that it was a nice in-road to their earlier material for those who had just got into this band. After all, ‘Primitive Painters’ was likely to be a lot of people’s introduction to Felt.

The Fourth Album: Ignite the Seven Cannons

In theory this should be the greatest Felt album of all.

Okay, bear with me.

Imagine recommending a perfect Felt album, one that perfectly encapsulates all that is great about the band. It isn’t easy, because the later ones feel incomplete without Deebank, just like the earlier ones feel incomplete without Duffy. Yet here we have an album that has both of them on it – the only one of the ten – and yet it’s all too much. Actually, that’s not because of something like Deebank and Duffy fighting for space or whatnot. The reason Ignite feels so cluttered is that the production by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie is fucking crazy. Everything merges in classic early Cocteaus-era style and it’s totally overwhelming, overripe and immense. Oddly enough, the album is relatively normal if you listen to it at a reasonably quiet level, but who would want to do that? Anyway, despite all of that, the reason Ignite is not the greatest Felt album is because it’s so structurally unbalanced. The first side is frankly perfect, one of the greatest sides of Felt vinyl you’re likely to hear. The second is just good. Good, but not good enough.

‘My Darkest Light Will Shine’ is another classic Felt scene-setter and almost self-aware-Lawrence is ‘back’, in case you didn’t notice! the production is overdone to the point where it almost becomes woozy listening, but oddly enough that’s part of its appeal. Given that the full title of this LP is Ignite the Seven Cannons and Set Sail for the Sun, there’s an appropriately nautical, oceanic and wavy ambience to the songs. Listen to it at the wrong time and you may feel a little sea sick, but at the right time it’s delightfully dreamy. ‘The Day the Rain Came Down’ begins with such insanely ecstatic ascending guitar that you may very well burst out laughing at the sheer giddy joy of it all. Of course, it’s not just the guitar. The bass and the drums keep it all going, and Duffy’s keyboards are a constant wellspring of warmth. I absolutely adore this song. It’s short, relentless, utterly thrilling and definitely in my top ten Felt songs. ‘Scarlet Servants’ is a nice respite after such high-velocity pop. Deebank and Duffy are beautifully matched. ‘I Don’t Know Which Way to Turn’ is brilliantly melodic, especially during the magnificent chorus, where everything just clicks wonderfully. The lyrics are some of the most revealing Lawrence would deliver – a line like ‘when I’m up there on the stage/I just hide my head and hope and pray that soon enough the show will end/why do I go through this hell?’. From someone who seemingly craved stardom, this is a shocking confession. The album’s centrepiece, in fact Felt’s own musical centrepiece, is ‘Primitive Painters’, and I’ve already discussed that, so let’s move on. On to the second side.

The second side used to seriously infuriate me. I used to think that it was such a disappointment. For one thing, there were too many instrumentals. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a instrumental-dominated second side. Low, anyone? But the melodies just weren’t strong enough, and without vocals, they sounded insubstantial. Only two things initially shined for me here – ‘Black Ship in the Harbour’ is a wonderful song. It really sounds like it was recorded at sea, and of course, its second line would provide the inspiration for one of Poem of the River‘s most darkly funny lyrics. ‘Southern State Tapestry’ winds itself up thrillingly before letting loose with a stream of melodic splendour. You can just sense the gears slowly turning and then eventually letting itself rip. A great album closer. Time has led to me appreciate the likes of the slight but entertaining flourishes of ‘Textile Ranch’ and ‘Serpent Shade’, and ‘Elegance of an Only Dream’ has some nice moments. ‘Caspian See’ remains the one duff moment, probably the most inconsequential, throwaway thing the band ever recorded.

However, the first side is just too good – so good it pretty much front-loads the album with classics, and the second side can’t help but feel like a disappointment. Despite ‘Primitive Painters’ modest success, Ignite the Seven Cannons didn’t set the world or anyone’s face on fire, and given that Deebank would leave the band for good, taking his essential, astonishing talent with him as he did so, Felt were now at a crossroads. How to proceed?

PS: In a surprising move, 2018’s long-awaited Felt reissue campaign intends to put right what Lawrence sees went wrong all those years ago by remixing most of the vocal songs on this album (‘Primitive Painters’ excepted) and removing ‘Serpent Shade’ from the second side so that the latter half of the album isn’t so instrumental-heavy. I can’t wait to see how the new mixes sound, but be careful what you wish for. This year’s much-touted remix of David Bowie’s Lodger was another case of ‘correcting’ flaws but in my opinion made the album sound worse!

The Seventh Single: ‘Ballad of the Band’

This EP marked a distinct change from the Deebank era. The atmospherics have been dialled down (and even though Robin Guthrie is back in the producer’s chair, his approach is much more restrained) and the emphasis is more on a simpler, even rootsier feel, as though Felt were having their very own 1968 and decided it was time to go back to basics. The title track is also far more lyrically blunt and less mysterious than anything we’d heard from Lawrence before, as though the honesty of ‘I Don’t Know Which Way to Turn’ had inspired him to carry on down that route. Just one listen to the words and it’s obvious it’s all about the recently departed Deebank. Maybe even the lovely ‘I Didn’t Mean to Hurt You’ is about him too? The flipside features a couple of instrumentals that are also a major departure from Felt’s established M.O. Listen to all that piano! Piano hadn’t played a part in the band’s sound up until now, and ‘Ferdinand Magellan’ and ‘Candles in a Church’ are essentially solo Martin Duffy pieces. They’re absolutely beautiful. They sound utterly timeless – centuries old even. Very romantic, very elegant pieces, very intimate. Close your eyes and you’re there. Somewhere else.

The Fifth Album: Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death

As soon as this album begins, I laugh; “Song for William S. Harvey” kicks off with a so-silly-it’s-almost-genius bit of Hammond organ and you may be wondering what on earth happened with Felt…after all, they’d released a couple of sterling indie-pop treasures and were almost on their way to becoming quite popular….then this! A short collection of instrumentals, which means NO vocals by Lawrence!

Never mind though, especially since “Song for William S. Harvey” (named after the guy who designed many a classic LP cover for Elektra Records) does turn out to be a rather cracking treat – a little bit goofy, a little bit delightful, and just as melodic as you’d expect from Felt by now. This was one of two instrumental albums in the band’s lifetime – one of them was pretty bad (Train Above the City), but this is a real good one; taken alone, each piece is short, almost slight, reminiscent of Brian Eno’s fade-in/fade-out glimmers of instrumentation on Music for Films, but like that work, if taken as one listen, it turns out to be yet another Felt gem. For one thing, it’s such a small album. So unassuming, so friendly, so cute and delightful. Of course, its very lightness makes it seem far less substantial than most of the other Felt albums, but sometimes you just want an album to cuddle up to and relax with.

“Ancient City Where I Lived” does feature great guitar (by Lawrence) and it’s a mini-beauty, accompanied by the sound of the tide and passing seagulls flying overhead. “The Seventeenth Century” and “The Palace” are very good, evocative mood-pieces, with nice interplay between Lawrence’s guitar and Duffy’s organ. The latter gets a real chance to properly shine with the very sweet, lovely “Indian Scriptures”, the sedate, minimalist respite that is “Voyage to Illumination” and the delightful, cocktail bar-esque shuffle of “Jewel Sky”, which is what the similarly styled but badly executed Train Above the City should have sounded like. “Viking Dress” (the longest track here at 2.50 minutes!) is a classic: ‘Viking Dress’ drifts into earshot like the morning tide, its guitar a buoy lost at sea, but then the mist fades away and the sun comes in with that sparkling Duffy melody and I’m so, so happy to be listening to this pretty wonder. On the other end of the spectrum, the chirpy, cheeky “Sapphire Mansions” is the weakest track, and that’s a shame as it ends a unique, quietly dazzling album on a slightly sour note, but never mind; for the most part, this is another wonderfully offbeat, charming Felt album.

PS: Another 2018 revision from Lawrence for the impending reissue will involve changing this album’s admittedly bonkers title to the less ostentatious The Seventeenth Century…

The Sixth Album: Forever Breathes the Lonely Word

This is the one Felt album that we can all agree on. It’s an absolute gem. It’s not the be-all, end-all Felt album though. I mean, it doesn’t have Deebank on it, and Felt without Deebank is incomplete, just as Felt without Duffy is incomplete. Now that would make you think that Ignite the Seven Cannons is a complete Felt record, but it isn’t, as I’ve already mentioned. Forever Breathes is still a fucking magnificent, wonderful thing nonetheless. It was the first Felt album I ever heard, and at first I was shocked at how prevalent the organ was on it. In fact, I wasn’t sure how to respond to it. That organ sounded a little, well chintzy, I suppose? A bit too bargain basement? People would level a smiliar ‘charity shop’ keyboard ambience towards Candida Doyle’s playing on Pulp’s records, but I never had a problem with that. In fact, I loved it. However, Duffy’s insistent organ-playing on this record threatened to irritate me. I got over it.

The album also marked a return to traditional songs after the delightful instrumental interludes of the previous album; Duffy well and truly proves his worth as a fine replacement for Deebank, delivering jaunty, wonderful keyboard lines over Lawrence’s jingliest and jangliest of guitars. Thos guitars are also as warm and welcoming as a beacon’s light, sometimes as crisp as autumn leaves. That voice of his still isn’t technically amazing, but Lawrence has real character and personality to his vocals, and he knows how to use what he has got to wonderful effect; I’ll take that over your textbook `talented’ voices any day of the week. His chemistry with Duffy on this album was never bettered, before or since.

“Rain of Crystal Spires” is a terrific opener; the guitars glisten and sparkle and contribute to one of the brightest melodies the band ever created; of all the songs Felt made in their post-Deebank years, this one’s the absolute best. No wonder it was selected as a single, which was quite a rarity for a band who preferred to keep their albums and singles as separate entities; still, just one listen to this absolute gem of a song and you can see why it was given A-side status. Almost as good is the buoyant “Down But Not Yet Out” which crackles with energy and heavenly music from start to finish; to be honest, there’s an identical, memorable guitar hook that’s used in both of these opening songs, as well as “Grey Streets”, but the effect isn’t repetitive, as the hook in question is so damn good that it’s worth hearing more than once. The warm, woozy “September Lady” boasts some of the sweetest `aaahhh’ backing vocals, glorious guitars, a swirling, romantic feel….this album is addictive stuff, believe me! “Grey Streets” closes off a more or less faultless first side with countless wonderful moments throughout; one of the fastest paced and infectiously exciting Felt songs around, and that’s a fact.

On the second side, “All the People I Like are Those That are Dead” is appropriately ghostly and atmospheric, boasting the immortal opening couplet of ‘Perhaps I should entertain/The very fact that I’m insane’ while “Gather Up Your Wings and Fly” has some euphoric, thrilling hooks and the wonderful “A Wave Crashed on Rocks” is one of the band’s best ballads, truly heart-stopping and breathtakingly elegant. The closing “Hours of Darkness Have Changed My Mind” is probably the least memorable thing here, but it still flows by very pleasantly indeed.

It’s this album that stands as Lawrence’s strongest argument that the band could be just as vital without Deebank. He’s not missed on this album.

The Seventh Single: ‘Rain of Crystal Spires’

As previously mentioned, the album track ‘Rain of Crystal Spires’ was released as a single, backed with fellow Forever Breathes song ‘Gather Up Your Wings and Fly’ and two new B-sides. ‘I Will Die with my Head in Flames’ and ‘The Sandman’s on the Rise Again’ are essential, snappy and brief blasts of rocket-fuelled power pop. Taken together, the two songs barely make it past the three minute mark. They would have been too fast and frenzied to be included on Forever Breathes, although in terms of quality, they are easily the equal of anything on that album. Lawrence’s guitar can barely contain itself on ‘Sandman’, Duffy sounds wired on ‘Flames’. Excellent songs.

The Seventh Album: Poem of the River

“I will be the first person in history to die of boredom” is a great opening line for an album. “And I will have as my epitaph the second line of `Black Ship in the Harbour'” is a cheeky follow-up. By the way, that `second line`, taken from the band’s Ignite the Seven Cannons album, is “I was a moment that quickly passed”. It’s a striking beginning to the autumnal Poem of the River, which continues to build on the new-found musical partnership between Lawrence and Duffy and, despite being slightly not as good as Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, is another work of wonder to add to a canon work that was, frankly, an embarrassment of riches by this stage.

The mood here is alternately romantic, rough, sweet and laid-back, with two epic songs – “She Lives By the Castle” and “Riding on the Equator” – dominating proceedings in terms of length. The former, rumoured to be about future Saint Etienne singer Sarah Cracknell, is a real beauty; if only it didn’t go on just that little bit too long with its extended organ solo at the end, we’d be talking one of the top ten Felt songs. Still, for the first four minutes, it’s one of the most delicate, sweetest things created by this band, and Lawrence’s vocals and guitars in particular are rather wonderful. “Riding on the Equator” isn’t quite classic Felt, but it slides along prettily and contributes to the album very well. There’s a long guitar solo at the end that might not jump out at you upon first listen, but it’s very sweet indeed! The opening “Declaration”, with its rough, ready and simpler sound, foreshadows the down-to-earth sound of The Pictorial Jackson Review. The lyrics are quite vicious compared to the rest of the album, with its surprising threat of ‘I’ll stab a knife in the face/Of any man who dares to oppose me’ while the stunning, adorable mini-masterpiece that is “Stained-Glass Windows in the Sky” would be just as much of an influence with its short, sharp burst of pop bliss. The latter song in particular encapsulates everything great about the Lawrence/Duffy era of Felt in just over two minutes; it wasn’t a single (although a video was made for it) but it’s peachy, slinky guitar, a beautifully resigned Lawrence vocal and an insistently catchy beat meant it really should have been one. It drifts in and out before you know it, but its fleeting nature is the main reason it works, and I have looped this track over and over many times, I must admit. You’ll feel like taking a ‘jetplane on a highway’ after this one, I hope.

Poem of the River may be the most innocuous, nicest Felt album of them all, barring maybe Let the Snakes… It doesn’t scream for your attention, it just drifts along very nicely in its own slow-burning way. “Silver Plane” is an understated, gentle little ditty that I like more and more every time I hear it, while the closing semi-acoustic “Dark Red Birds” is up there with “A Preacher in New England” as one of the best Felt album closers; haunting, relaxing, poetic and deeply lovely, it just pulls you in and keeps you there. It truly sounds like a cold autumn sunset in November.

A perfect, mellow accompaniment to Forever Breathes the Lonely Word‘s pop-fuelled sparkle, Poem of the River proved that a this stage, Felt could do no wrong.

The Eighth Single: ‘The Final Resting of the Ark

Felt were spoiling us with yet another EP of non-album songs after Poem, and Robin Guthrie was back too. The title track remains the sparsest, most haunting lead-track of any of their non-album releases. Guthrie’s approach is even more scaled down than what he gave us on the Ballad of the Band, all hushed, acoustic, whispered ambience. ‘There’s No Such Thing as Victory’ is even sparser: gentle, melancholic and resigned, if it wasn’t for the golden glow of the production, this song would be even sadder than it already was.

‘Buried Wild Blind’ is a minute-long guitar instrumental, and it may as well have been called ‘Golden Sunshine’ for the sheer glistening, honeyed warmth it exudes. Yet to be released on CD, it’s a small and beaming little moment. ‘Fire Circle’ is very slight, just a small piece of guitar, nothing more, nothing less. It’s very nice indeed. This whole EP is very nice, in fact. It’s even more autumnal than Poem, as though that album’s closing ‘Dark Red Birds’ was the launching point for a deeper venture into the mysterious woods that made for Felt’s new-found environment. This would change soon, though…

The Eighth Album: The Pictorial Jackson Review

This may very well be the most frustrating of all Felt’s albums; we have a very fine first side which sees them going right for the pop jugular, and a second side that takes in ambient jazz with mostly unimpressive results. So let’s concentrate on the first eight tracks. Taking their cue from Poem of the River‘s delightful pop treat “Stained-Glass Windows in the Sky” we have a set of utterly unpretentious, cheery and engaging mini-gems that work very nicely, even if I was initially rather disappointed with this new, relatively simple direction.

The mystique, sweep and drama of Felt’s earlier days had been well and truly swept aside for a sound that was nowhere near as ambitious, though it’s informal, upbeat mood soon won me over. It’s almost like an 80’s equivalent of Bob Dylan retiring to Big Pink and recording The Basement Tapes with The Band. It sounds like a bunch of guys recording good, fun music. It sounds live, and the incarnation of Felt here are delightfully in sync. So yeah, there’s still enough recognisable character here to make this another quintessentially Felt album, but this is nevertheless a wildly different sound to that of “Primitive Painters”, “The World is as Soft as Lace” or “Dismantled King is Off the Throne”; personally, I’ll always prefer the earlier material, but taken on its own terms, this first side works brilliantly. The considerably lo-fi production has meant that this album has its detractors, but if you’re willing to go along for the rough, ready ride, then it proves quite lovable.

The opening “Apple Boutique” has great guitars and sweet organ work, not to mention charming lyrics (plus Lawrence doing his best sedated Lou Reed impersonation) and a simple, summery mood that works a treat. Be prepared to bounce along to this one. Clearly the band thought so too, as this method is repeated over the next seven songs. Luckily, none of it gets stale or repetitive, as the playing is consistently lively and the songs themselves are breezily short, with only one (“Under a Pale Light”) spanning over three minutes. Other highlights are the delightful “Bitter End” (which has a splendid guitar performance), the delicate “Under a Pale Light” and the kooky, funny “Don’t Die on My Doorstep”. Encompassing less than twenty minutes of music, the first eight songs on this album would have worked very well on their own, and could have made for a great EP. In fact, it could have just been released as a proper album. It still would have been longer than Let the Snakes…!

However, things go all pear-shaped on the majority of the second side, when the album mutates into a jazzy ambient work; “Sending Lady Load” starts off reasonably well enough, but then those dreaded xylophone noodlings that would come to dominate the cocktail-bar banality of Train Above the City creep into earshot, and it all becomes wearisome. Also, at over twelve minutes, this piece is far too long. It’s almost enough to entirely sink the album, but the closing track “The Darkest Ending” resolves matters a little; exploring the same direction as “Sending Lady Load” but with much better results, it has an eerie, spooky atmosphere and essentially delivers far more in its three minutes than the preceding track attempted in twelve.

So, despite that unfortunate excursion into near-elevator music on the second side, The Pictorial Jackson Review is well worth getting for the first eight tracks (and, to be fair, the last track too), but be warned…..a pressing error on early copies of the 2003 reissue resulted in everything from “Apple Boutique” to “Don’t Die on My Doorstep” being accidentally replaced with the entirety of Felt’s next album Train Above the City, before returning to the album proper for its last two tracks. Blimey, avoid that version at all costs.

The Ninth Album: Train Above the City

This is the most controversial Felt album; controversial, obviously for those who have heard of it, and I can’t imagine there are many. This is unlike anything else they’d ever released. All of their other albums have a distinctive sound that makes each its own, but all of them are quintessentially Felt. To be fair, I don’t know many people who have listened to The Pictorial Jackson Review, but if I’m sure if I asked everyone who had which side they’d have preferred to be the springboard for a follow-up album, I get the feeling the majority would plump for the first side. But oh no, it turns out that Side 2 was the germ for what was to follow, and what followed was the most surprising Felt album of them all.

I mean, it doesn’t sound anything like Felt. Now I have no problem with bands moving in directions so far away from their norm that it doesn’t resemble what made people fall for them in the first place, but if the music simply isn’t any good, then we’re talking disaster.

Train Above the City is Felt’s Metal Machine Music, and it’s about half as listenable. The first side is like having the intro music to Frasier on loop for fifteen minutes. We’re talking serious, cocktail jazz muzak here, which might drive you bonkers if you’re not in the right mood. I have no idea what said right mood could be, by the way. Xylophones are everywhere. Lawrence on the other hand is nowhere to be heard (this is a Martin Duffy/Gary Ainge collaboration). All he did was contribute the song titles, which are predictably brilliant. This is not typical Felt (even the album sleeve, a garish yellow, isn’t in keeping with the rest of their artwork), but on the other hand, it’s so bloomin’ contrary and unpredictable that in a sense, it’s perfect Felt. Just don’t ask me to listen to it too often. No one can doubt the musical chops of Duffy and Ainge (and this is the kind of muso album that the word ‘chops’ is sadly suited for), but you have to wonder what they were thinking – were they taking the piss? Sometimes, like on the title track and ‘Press Softly on the Brakes, Holly’, I can’t help but laugh – this stuff is such a perfect approximation of bland jazz noodling. But seriously, the first half of the album is without a doubt the worst stretch of any Felt album, ever.

The slower, more melancholy second half of the album does see an improvement of sorts;`Spectral Morning’ and `Teargardens’ are actually quite nice, and the tender `Book of Swords’ is really, genuinely lovely, by far and away the best thing here. Actually, I’ve been horrible towards this album, so let’s concentrate on this track. Yes, you could say it’s a little soppy and a little drippy, but this lovely piece of music has often caught me off guard and broken my wee lil’ heart. It is almost ridiculously pretty and gives me doubt that this was album was meant to be a parody, which is something I couldn’t help/hope but presume for the most part. The melody is one of Duffy’s saddest. It starts off a bit like Chicago’s much-loved wedding staple ‘Colour My World’ and then goes off on its own. A sparkling xylophone and downbeat piano combine beautifully before we get a brief but gorgeous mid-section where everything blossoms and for once, this Train Above the City album really clicks.

I guess, if you’re in a forgiving mood, you might appreciate what I assume is a joke and admire the album for its sheer wilful perversity, but I’m confident that this is most fans’ least favourite Felt album.

The Tenth Single: ‘Space Blues’

Ah, now this is more like it! Now, please don’t think I’m one of those reactionaries who only want Felt to stick to what they know, because this EP is still a departure and a step forward, but unlike Train Above the City, it’s a good one. Only the jingle-jangle of ‘Female Star’ is a bit of a throwback, as if the melodies of The Pictorial Jackson Review were shot through with the fuller sound of Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. Elsewhere, we have more evidence of Felt refusing to stand still. The pleasant country swoon of ‘Tuesday’s Secret’ points the way towards the smooth, polished but still idiosyncratic sound of their final album, and the title track’s colourful electronics point even further towards Lawrence’s next project, the glorious Denim. Backing vocals on this song are from Rose McDowall from Strawberry Switchblade, by the way! I’ve saved my favourite song here for last, and that’s the beautiful cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘Be Still’. Originally a gentle, sparse Dennis Wilson ode to serenity from the glorious 1968 album Friends, Felt make it even more quiet and totally their own. It’s the only cover they officially recorded, and is akin to floating down a never-ending river.

The not-really Eleventh Single: ‘Get Out of My Mirror’

This was a free flexidisc. No B-side. The A-side is taken from….

The Tenth Album: Me and a Monkey on the Moon

Here we are. The end of the road. The tenth album. It was something of an artistic recovery after the disappointing Train Above the City, and yet this swansong is also quite unusual in that for a Felt album, it sounds….well, normal! The opening song even talks of (not) making love! I though Felt were above all that sex stuff, you know? Produced by Adrian Borland, lead singer of another tremendous, underrated band from the 1980’s (The Sound), Felt had never sounded as polished and mainstream as they do here; the playing is immaculate, refined, and to be honest….lacking in edge. For some, this sleek new direction might prove a turn-off, and yes, there’s none of the strange magic of their earlier, classic records.

Still, it’s a damn good album, with lyrics that talk of escape and decades (and I suppose bands) coming to an end, maybe even some regrets over lost friends, all of it beautifully played and sung throughout; the opening “I Can’t Make Love To You Anymore” is very lovely, a slightly country-tinged ballad with some sweet, tender guitar and a great chorus. “Mobile Shack”, with its kooky keyboard effects here and there, hint towards Denim, but the simple, cheeky music also recalls the first side of The Pictorial Jackson Review, albeit with a smoother production. To be honest, this song isn’t really anything special, it goes by well enough and is essentially a bit of filler before the wonderful “Free” comes along, another tender and delicate ballad that feels good and sounds good too. The lyrically curious “Budgie Jacket” (is it autobiographical?) is intriguing and the sprightly “Cartoon Sky” is fun. These are good songs, you know? Well played, consummately executed… hell, even Lawrence’s vocals sound refined.

The album’s major centrepiece is “New Day Dawning”, which has a great first half; a slightly funky guitar (the verses sound like a brighter version of Poem of the River‘s “Declaration”) a shimmering chorus which indeed sounds the musical equivalent of a sunrise….and then there’s the debatable second half and its extended solo; guitar bliss or six-string cheese? Indeed, it sounds as though Oasis may have been paying attention as it sounds a lot like their “Don’t Look Back in Anger” in places. To be honest, it’s this solo that’s entirely indicative of the downside of the `normal’ Felt sound on this album; it’s admittedly well played, but it could have been played by any other guitarist. It’s totally anonymous, and character and personality, with the distinctive feel and sound of Lawrence, Martin Duffy and Maurice Deebank in particular, was what made Felt such a special band. Oh well, I can’t resist the gorgeous “Down an August Path”; it flutters, it feels good to listen to, it’s the best thing on here, definitely. The rest of the album remains solid, be it on the sweet choruses to “Never Let You Go” and “She Deals in Crosses” or particularly on the catchy closer “Get Out of My Mirror”.

Even with the lovely likes of “I Can’t Make Love to You Anymore” and “Down an August Path”, there’s nothing here that I will truly hold dear to my heart, nothing like “Spanish House”, “Fortune” or “The Day the Rain Came Down”; considering how strong this band was for its first eight and a half albums, Me and a Monkey on the Moon is a very good, but not great farewell to one of the greatest bands ever. It wasn’t the last time we’d hear from Lawrence though….he’d back….back in Denim!

Wait, that’s not all…

Collecting together some of those odds ‘n’ sods…

If it’s compilations you’re after, and they will be essential listening if you want to get those non-album singles and B-sides, then the ultimate introduction is 1992’s Absolute Classic Masterpieces, which covers Felt’s years at Cherry Red Records (excluding their brief return to the label in 1989); covered here is the era encompassing the first four albums and the best of the stray tracks; in other words, the Maurice Deebank years. Starting with with `Primitive Painters’ and working backwards, this is a mostly perfect selection of the best songs from the early years – okay, one might quibble at the absence of `I Don’t Know Which Way to Turn’ (which should definitely have taken the place of the good but not great `Textile Ranch’) and the stunning `Spanish House’, but overall this is too good to bother starting with debates about track selection. Non-album selections here are the immortal B-side version of ‘Fortune’, ‘Trails of Colour Dissolve’ (but not its flipside, the A-side ‘My Face is on Fire!), ‘Something Sends Me to Sleep’, pre-Felt oddity ‘Index’ and most interestingly, `Dance of Deliverance’, which isn’t actually a Felt track as such, being as it’s taken from Deebank’s occasionally magnificent solo album from that time (Inner Thought Zone), which takes the languid guitar mood of `Fortune’ to epic lengths. Look, Felt are one of the greatest bands ever, and this is one of the greatest compilations ever. This period in particular had an irresistible charge, dominated by Deebank and Lawrence’s winning chemistry. This is the best introduction to the band, even though it only tells half the story…

Roll on 1993’s Absolute Classic Masterpieces Vol. 2, which covers Felt’s second half of their ten year run, spent at Creation Record. These are the Martin Duffy years. Unlike Volume 1, this compilation runs in chronological order and separates album tracks and single tracks into separate CDs. Disc one (featuring singles and B-sides) is pretty short at only twenty or so minutes, which is weird considering not every B-side of this era has been included (no ‘Candles in a Church’, ‘Buried Wild Blind’, ‘Fire Circle’, ‘Tuesday’s Secret’, ‘Female Star’ are all M.I.A); nevertheless, each of these ten songs are terrific. Disc 2 covers the following albums – Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, Poem of the River, The Pictorial Jackson Review and Train Above the City. Unfortunately Me and a Monkey on the Moon, isn’t covered as that was recorded on Cherry Red (who the band returned to before disbanding).

To be honest, despite the fact that all the pieces chosen here to represent Let the Snakes… are delightful, they don’t really have the same impact outside of the context of the original album; here they come across as too slight. Forever Breathes is well represented, although the omission of `Rain of Crystal Spires’, `September Lady’ or `Down But Not Yet Out’ does seem crazy. The Pictorial Jackson Review is well represented – we get some of the fun treats from side one, and the single good one from side two. The disastrous Train Above the City could have got away with an undeserved positive representation had tracks from its relatively decent second side had been chosen to appear on this disc, yet this CD doesn’t bother to try and mask what this album is- a bit crap – by choosing three anaemic tunes from its first side, ending this compilation on a down note. Why the lovely `Book of Swords’, wasn’t selected instead is a mystery.

Still, this is a more than worthy companion piece to its predecessor, though it is hard to find these days. If you don’t fancy shelling out for a second-hand copy, fear not; all of the second disc can be found on their respective albums, while most of disc one can now be found on the more recent retrospective Stains on a Decade. However, that album doesn’t appear to have “Magellan” or “Autumn” on it….pity. The best Creation-era compilation is the single-disc Bubblegum Perfume from 1990, which mostly avoids album tracks (but does well in highlighting ‘Book of Swords’ – bravo!) and distills the essence of the Duffy years beautifully. Still no Monkey and Moon-era stuff though. Boo! An even better CD re-release in 2011 dispensed with some of the ultimately pointless album-track selections and replaced them with the hard-to-find ‘Tuesday’s Secret’, ‘Fire Circle’ and ‘Female Star’.

As for the afore-mentioned Stains on a Decade from 2003, it’s a fine compilation, but covering ten years worth on one CD was always going to be a nightmare. Still, but limiting itself to single/EP tracks (‘Dismantled King…’ excepted), it’s about as fairly representative a single CD of the band can be, I suppose. Plus, it features the single version of ‘Sunlight Bathed…’, even if that version isn’t very good.

Finally, there was 1987’s Gold Mine Trash, which was the first Felt compilation, and a seemingly random selection of songs from the Deebank-era. It’s only really worthwhile for the inclusion of demo versions of ‘Sunlight Bathed…’ and ‘Dismantled King…’ which are well worth your time, being notably different in feel to the more familiar takes.

To my knowledge, the only Felt tracks that have never been available on CD are ‘Break It’,the original B-side version of ‘A Preacher in New England’, ‘Now Summer’s Spread Its Wings Again’, ‘Candles in a Church’ and ‘Buried Wild Blind’. There was a bonus disc made available on the Felt Box set released in 1993, which gathered a few odds and sods like the alternate ‘Something Sends Me to Sleep’, the often neglected ‘My Face is on Fire’, the single mix of ‘Sunlight Bathed…’, ‘Sunlight Strings’ and the original B-side version of ‘Red Indians’, but that’s not easy to come by.

Predator is thirty years old this year, and you know what? It’s still a remarkably entertaining, spectacularly impressive piece of work, and the first of two films from director John McTiernan that catapulted him to the very top of the action genre. Die Hard is arguably the more accomplished of the two, but Predator is no mere warm-up. What’s particularly great about it is just how stunningly well made it is – compared to Arnie’s other films of this era like Commando, Raw Deal, The Running Man and Red Heat – Predator stands out in the way it showcases a director with an expert handling of action, suspense, atmosphere and intensity. As much as I love Commando and The Running Man, their direction is merely solid, whereas McTiernan is clearly a filmmaker of exceptional skill and confidence.

Just like Die Hard, it has an dazzling attention to craft. Rare is the Arnie film where you can sit back and truly admire how it is mad. Its humid, oppressive South American jungle setting is utilised to remarkable effect – you really feel like there in the bush, with no escape. The camera moves in and around this world and you’re totally immersed. The cinematography, lighting and sound design is first-rate. Also, there’s a claustrophobic, intense and very memorable, all-encompassing score by Alan Silvestri that is loaded with killer hooks.

The plot is utterly straightforward: bad-ass Major ‘Dutch’ (Schwarzenegger) and his squadron of soldiers – all-round nice guy and explosives expert ‘Poncho’ (Richard Chaves), intense, razor-happy medic Mac (Bill Duke), stoic navigator Billy (Sonny Landham), behemoth gunner and self-proclaimed ‘sexual tyrannosaurus’ Blain (Jesse Ventura) and resident joker and communications operator Hawkins (Shane Black) – are sent by untrustworthy colonel Dillon (Carl Fuckin’ Weathers) to the jungle of what (outside of the film) is revealed to be the fictional South American country of Val Verde (as also depicted in Commando and Die Hard 2) to rescue a cabinet minister being held hostage by bad (read that as non-Americans) guys. Once the (failed) rescue is over and Dillon is revealed to have set Dutch’s team up on what could have been a suicide mission, the soldiers – plus Anna, a hostage from the raid – soon find themselves the target of an alien predator who appears to picking them off one at a time for sport and who can also camouflage itself within the trees. Totally outclassed by the Predator, the team are swiftly dispatched until only Dutch remains, culminating in a battle between human and alien…

Of course, if you’re reading this review, the odds are you already know the plot, making the previous paragraph a complete waste of time, but I loved summarising the story and I hope you enjoyed reading it. Let’s move on, shall we?

Strangely, despite being what you could reasonably argue is the archetypal Schwarzenegger movie, Predator is a unique entry in the man’s classic era. Rare is the Arnie film where he is part of a team – admittedly, it’s a team that’s wiped out by the end, but he doesn’t stand head and shoulders ahead of everybody else. For the most part he’s one of the guys, even if he is in charge. His musclebound presence is more than matched by most of his colleagues. Also, this is the only film of his, barring Terminator 2, where his adversary poses a serious, lethal challenge. The final act of Predator is a fight to the death, and unlike the no-contest finales of Commando, Raw Deal, Total Recall, etc, you actually fear for his character’s life instead of curiously worrying about the bad guys. Also, has any Arnie film ended with him looking so beaten down and forlorn?

Predator eschews the traditional Arnie finale, which even at this early stage was becoming recognisable. You know, tool up, kill every motherfucker in the room, that sort of thing. In fact, you could argue that the typical shoot-em-up set-piece that would normally close every other Arnie film takes place a mere twenty or so minutes into Predator. The ambush set-piece, where Dutch and the guys lay waste to some cannon fodder in guiltily spectacular fashion could plausibly be the culmination of any other Arnie film. After that we enter new, unexplored territory. The first act of Predator, discovery of skinned bodies and quick Predator POV shots aside, plays out as a straight-up action movie. After that, the science-fiction and horror elements creep in. We’re not in Kansas anymore. This is new territory. Okay, if you take the film apart, you’ll recognise elements of Alien and Aliens, not to mention the plethora of post-Vietnam action films like Missing in Action and Rambo: First Blood, Part II, but really, it’s difficult to see the joins.

For me, Predator was one of the first films that acted as an in-road to the horror genre, which I would have been too scared to approach at my early age back in the early nineties. Yes, it’s an Arnie film, yes it has enough firepower to level a small planet and yes, the machismo is through the roof, but when the second act kicks in, it’s essentially a slasher film with bells on. The Predator heat-vision POV material is straight out of the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th – but by playing around this gimmick, by making the Predator’s vision an essential part of his character and something that can not only be used to its advantage but also to its detriment (see the brilliant “he couldn’t see me” scene), you end up with a truly novel spin on a horror staple that by the late eighties, had become very, very old indeed. True, the whole heat-vision element wasn’t entirely original – you can spot it in embryonic form in Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 horror Wolfen – but Predator ran with it and made it truly iconic.

The violence is also rooted in the horror genre – we’re talking gore here, people. It still packs a punch – it knows when to show stuff and when not to. Some of the worst stuff is left to our imagination, some of it isn’t. Also, the Predator’s M.O is hinted at but not really explored – later films in the canon would tell us more, but ultimately it was all unnecessary. The original Predator is still the best because it pretty much tells us all we need to know, and frankly, it makes his rituals and methods all the scarier. The special effects – cute electrical malfunctioning glitches and one ropey ‘camouflage’ shot just before Hawkins is murdered aside – are still amazing, and Stan Winston’s design for the Predator is, hands down, the best monster the cinema has ever seen. The film brilliantly teases us with quick hints as to just what exactly this creature is – a brief shot here, a camouflaged outline there, a shot of a hand, a trail of blood, and even when we’re very late into the film, it’s still wearing a mask. When that mask comes off…. wow. I mean, what can you say? I mean, you can say ‘ugly motherfucker’ if you so wish, but the design on that face is frankly extraordinary. Utterly repulsive, utterly fascinating and with a grotesquely dazzling attention to detail. I totally believe that I’m looking at an alien, and Kevin Peter Hall’s physical performance adds a hell of a lot too. He also played Harry in the same year’s Bigfoot and the Hendersons (or Harry and the Hendersons outside of the UK).

The action is also tremendously visceral. The film has an arsenal and knows how to use it. The raid on the enemy soldiers is just kill, kill, KILL. Who were those bad guys? It doesn’t matter, they’re bad guys. Just kill them. Shamefully, this scene is utterly thrilling, and we all get off on those shots of evil bastards getting shot up or blown up or stabbed up or whatnot. There’s also the ‘stick around’ dispatching, which, thanks to Dutch’s outright glee during this moment, remains one of Arnie’s most hilarious one-liners. The bit where Mac begins what ends up being a outright destruction of a small section of jungle is outrageously executed. Scenes of preparation and booby-trap setting are gripping (if ultimately hopeless – these guys don’t stand a chance), and the Predator’s kills are still sudden, gruesome and full of impact. One extraordinary bit follows the brief moment of quiet following Billy’s death, when Poncho is suddenly killed (notable for being the only death in the film with virtually no build-up or warning), Anna goes for the nearest gun, Dutch kicks it away and lets rip with a fucking ENORMOUS onslaught of firepower, yelling as he does so, Silvestri’s score banging away and I, the viewer, gripped, pumped and breathless.

Ah yes, the score. Continuing to move on from the synthesised joys of his Delta Force and Flight of the Navigator soundtracks, Silvestri proves to be a master of the orchestrated score, rivalling the splendour of his Back to the Future work and delivering a pounding, militaristic, (surprisingly) sad, chilling and outright frightening array of timeless themes. One of my favourite moments of sound and vision in this film is the camouflage scene. When Dutch thinks he’s found some rest time, after having survived two death-defying drops and a brief but intense swim, the Predator suddenly lands in the river behind him… he crawls up through the mud and awaits what looks like certain doom, but thanks to the Predator’s compromised heat vision being unable to detect Dutch through all that mud, he moves on and walks away. This for me is one of the most gripping moments in the film – true, the script spells it out a bit too clearly with Dutch’s ‘he couldn’t see me!’, a line that I’m surprised the Predator didn’t hear and swiftly react to – but the direction, chilling score and that eerie slow-motion shot of the Predator walking away (don’t know why, but it used to freak me out!) makes it, more than any other moment in Schwarzenegger’s films, a scene where I genuinely feared for his character’s life.

As for the characters, well they’re two-dimensional for sure, but they’re vividly portrayed and acted with gusto – we all have our favourite Predator character, who’s yours? Dutch is the obvious choice, but what about the jokey, doomed Hawkins? The bad motherfucker (but ultimately doomed) Blain? The ever-so-slightly-crazy but strangely sad-eyed (and doomed) Mac? The no-nonsense, doomed Everyman Poncho? The sixth-sense blessed but ultimately crazy and ultimately doomed Billy? The cynical and bastardly but nevertheless he-was-still-Apollo Creed (and just as doomed) Dillon? Or how about the utterly non-doomed Anna? Mine was Mac. I loved Mac. I felt awful for him. His death always seemed the cruellest. He never stood a chance did he? And he never did have him some fun tonight, did he? Poor sod.

Ultimately, Predator is one of the most purely enjoyable, thrilling genre films of the 1980s – it’s a precision-tooled, perfectly executed and still outstanding experience – its ubiquity (how many times has it been on TV now?) hasn’t dulled its edges. Watching it on a big screen for its 30th anniversary was like seeing it for the first time all over again, and given that I’ve watched it three thousand times already, that made for quite an evening of entertainment.

PS: The end credits are a wonderful/hilarious montage of the main players, all of them smiling and/or laughing, as if almost to reassure the viewer, that they’re not really dead, that everything is okay. The one of Sonny Landham as Billy is amazing.

PSS: A few years back, my good friend Mark and I recorded a commentary to listen to whilst watching the film. You can listen to it/download for free by clicking on the relevant link to the right!

Dario Argento reached the artistic stratosphere with his fifth film, the stunning and breathtaking Deep Red (Profondo Rosso). His first three big-screen features, which I’ve already discussed on this blog, all have their merits and pleasures (I still haven’t seen his atypical fourth film, the comedy The Five Days of Milan, but by most accounts it’s not great). Yet, for all that’s fine and formidable about his pre-1975 work, The Golden Age of Argento truly began with Deep Red.

What a film.

Truly, one of the most dazzling, relentlessly bravura, entertaining and sleek thrillers ever made. The quantum leap from 1971’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet to this is astounding – no more fumbling, no more steady steps – now we’re in the hands of a master, one who appears to be in total control of what he wants to do and who loves fucking around with our expectations. Deep Red on one level is a suspense thriller, a giallo and a crowd pleaser and yet on the other hand it constantly keeps one on edge with its subversion of genre tropes and off-kilter direction. With this, Argento became one of the major players – he would remain so until 1987’s Opera – a director who became the subject of intense cult adoration and admiration. His very next film, the remarkable Suspiria, may for me be his greatest achievement (and my all-time favourite horror movie), but Deep Red runs it awfully close. They were first two Argento films I ever saw and as such towered over everything else he’d made that I’d eventually watch.

The plot, in some ways quite similar to that of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, involves a witnessing of a brutal crime (an attempted murder in the earlier film, an actual murder this time round) and the subsequent amateur investigation undertaken by the witness. The onlooker and eventual sleuth is out-of-towner jazz pianist Marc Daly (David Hemmings), who finds himself the unwelcome target of the killer when headstrong journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi) rather insensitively plasters his face all over the next day’s paper. Marc’s obsessed with his belief that a painting that he saw just before he discovered the victim’s body has since disappeared, and that this fact must represent something important (or ‘importante’ in Italian – this word is used about a million times in the film and I love the pronunciation). His best friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) – a fellow pianist who is suffering from depression and alcoholism – warns him to back off but Marc’s too fascinated by the morbid mystery, which leads him to an abandoned ‘murder house’ that may reveal the answer to what he’s looking for.

Despite the later controversy surrounding Argento’s supposed misogyny (not helped by that infamous comment of his regarding his preference to seeing a beautiful woman murdered on screen as opposed to an ‘ugly’ one or a man), there are some interesting toying with characters’ and possibly the viewer’s own expectations regarding gender. Viewers of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage will already have a head start in this respect, but Deep Red goes one further by making the otherwise likeable Marc an old-school chauvinist (though we pity rather than hate him for this), and then having fun taking down his conservative assumptions down a notch or two, be it his frenzy over losing at an arm wrestling match between him and Gianna, or him looking like a fool sitting on a broken seat in her car. However, both apart and together, they get closer and closer to revealing the killer’s identity, culminating in a shocking, gruesome conclusion.

Ah yes, grue. Argento upped the violence considerably for his return to the giallo thriller – the first victim, clairvoyant Helga Ullman (Macha Meril) who unwittingly reads the thoughts of someone who has already killed in the past, is dispatched with a hatchet before being pushed through a window, where she dies having been perforated on the broken glass. We get a vicious, frankly outrageous act of violence towards a set of teeth that’s merely the build-up to a stabbing. Then there’s the death by scalding hot water, something Halloween II borrowed a few years on, and may very well be the most unpleasant moment in any of Argento’s films. Saying that, the most sadistic moment may be a wildly protracted death (the film’s penultimate) that, as shocking as it is, is something you can almost imagine Argento rubbing his hands together in malevolent glee whilst directing.

Viewers may spot the weird foreshadowing of these deaths (mirroring Helga’s second sight): Marc is burned by hot water from a coffee machine before the scalding murder, the shot of the water seeping out of Helga’s mouth at the start eerily mirrors a shot I can’t detail (spoiler reasons) right near the end. The supernatural element that is introduced at the start of the film is quickly ignored but at the same time never disproven – genuine clairvoyance is simply a part of this film’s real world logic. Argento would fully enter the world of the fantastic with his next film, but he started all of that here, although to be fair there were elements of his earlier films that also flirted with far-out elements. I’d say they were more successfully woven into the narrative with Deep Red though.

If you attempt to approach this film as a straight-up genre film, then the thriller element of Deep Red is engaging, satisfying and occasionally pretty damn chilling. Argento has yet to throw all of his logical caution to the wind at this early stage. However, the film’s greatest pleasure lies in the sheer verve in which Argento delivers all of this.

As Michael McKenzie states in his great documentary that was included as part of the Deep Red’s Arrow Films Blu-Ray release, to criticise Argento for being all about style over substance misses the point. The style is the substance. I mean, we get a five-minute plus sequence of Marc investigating the interiors of the possible murder house and there’s no dialogue – just pure visual and musical splendour, and I dig every moment of it. The house is beautifully eerie and full of atmosphere, so why not take the time to check it out? The music, chiefly by eventual Argento regulars Goblin as well as original composer Giorgio Gaslini (of whom only a few pieces of his made it to the final cut), is utterly spellbinding. The more conventional Gaslini stuff is lush and chilling, but the Goblin stuff is a fantastic prog-funk concoction that brings to mind Rick Wakeman (solo and Yes) and is utterly addictive, delightfully heavy on the bass-groove and full of still-iconic melodies that elevate the film to an even higher degree. They give the murder scenes in particular a real charge that’s unforgettable. A non-murderous musical highlight is during the house-investigation scene when the score suddenly stops when Marc accidentally steps on some broken glass, stays silent for a moment or two, and then abruptly comes in again when a set of curtains falls to the ground. Yep, it’s totally bringing attention to itself, and it’s having lots of fun doing so. I suppose the burning question is whether or not you as the viewer end up having as much fun.

Ah, but what about the performances? Well, whatever disinterest Argento would apparently later have for actors hasn’t manifested yet – his cast here is arguably the most in-sync, engaging and on-form he would ever work with. Hemmings is a delightful lead – he has a great, expressive face and a vulnerable presence which suits the film remarkably well. He’s brilliantly matched by Nicolodi as Gianna – their back-and-forth chemistry is a delight and she is one of the director’s most fun characters. They were a couple in real life during and after this film and as their relationship became more tempestuous, the treatment of her characters got a little nastier to say the least. Here, Gianna is the strongest and resourceful of all Argento’s characters from his classic era – she rightly takes down Marc’s sexism, is brave, funny and confident, even if she does ultimately cheat at arm wrestling. The supporting performances are lively and entertaining, especially Lavia’s tragic Carlo, Clara Calamai as his eccentric mother and Glauco Mauri as the enthusiastic professor Giordani. Not once does any of the acting take you out of the film, which is sadly something that some of the more wooden turns in later Argento films have been guilty of doing. No, here they are essential parts, rich and all part of the film’s lush fabric.

Notably, Deep Red was edited by around 22 minutes for export release, and while this tightens the narrative and surprisingly doesn’t become incoherent in the process, many of the pleasures of the full-length version are missing. The character of Gianna is severely truncated and in the process, much of the film’s gender politics are gone. Elsewhere, lots of nice character touches, humorous elements and moments that may not seem to add much but are just pure pleasure to watch are gone. Take the bit when Marc is snooping around the murder house – there’s a bit where he gets distracted by something and runs outside to investigate. It’s nothing, so he goes back in. The export cut edits this out to make Marc’s detection run a lot smoother, but I did miss this little aside in the shorter cut. Also, there’s the issue of which dub to go for – I’ve always watched the film with the Italian soundtrack because that’s the one I first watched (when it was released by Redemption Video in the 90’s – an almost entirely uncut version) so for me it’s weird watching the English dub, even if that really is David Hemming’s voice!

Deep Red’s entertainment factor may depend on how many thrillers you’ve already experienced – it definitely shakes the genre up a bit, for those who think they might have had their fill of this sort of thing, you may have a lot of the fun seeing the form played around with. That’s not to say it’s a wink-wink parody – no way. As I said, the film is a first-rate thriller and full of suspense, shock and gore. But it’s also gleeful too. Like the investigators in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Marc and Gianna seem to having too much fun at first in their sleuthing, which they probably wouldn’t be having in real life. However, if you think of the characters as stand-in viewers of this kind of mystery, then their enthusiasm makes sense. And wisely, when the stakes become seriously dangerous, that playfulness dissipates to make way for some serious chills. The final scene, as over-the-top as it is, is nonetheless disturbing, horrific and home to one of the all-time great final shots, which I won’t reveal here.

So there you go – on one level a classic chiller of the genre, on the other, one of the all-time great visceral experiences of cinema, a disorienting, off-kilter and wildly odd masterpiece that’ll still knock you sideways and have you coming back for more.

Mostly forgotten now, Geoff Murphy (Young Guns II)’s 1992 SF-action turkey Freejack got some attention back on its release for starring the one and only Mick Jagger. And as a twelve year old at the time the film was getting premiered on Sky’s movie channels, I was certainly interested in it because I thought the ads looked good, plus anything futuristic was always going to fascinate me after having been bowled over by Back to the Future Part II on the big screen a few years earlier. Unfortunately (or so I thought), those movie channels were out of our price range so I forgot about Freejack until it was premiered on BBC1 a few years later.

By then I had become more aware that the film was meant to be… how can I put it… a bit shit, so I geared myself up for a bumpy ride of some sorts. I wasn’t disappointed. I mean, it’s awful, but from the moment Jagger’s bounty hunter/’bonejacker’ Victor Vacendak lifts up the future-visor on his head and says, in that unmistakable camp London accent of his, ‘Okay… let’s do it!’ I knew I was going to love this film.

I had the foresight to tape Freejack at the time and made a point of rewatching it over and over again. Well, the good bits anyway. Bits of this film are really dull. But the good bits (and by that I mean the really bad bits) were pure comedy gold.

Based on Robert Sheckley’s novel Immortality, Inc. (more on that later), Freejack is set in a future where advancements in technology have made it possible for a mind to be transplanted into another human body. Meanwhile in present-day 1992, hot shot racing driver Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is apparently killed mid-race when his car explodes in front of his adoring fans, his adoring girlfriend Julie (Rene Russo) and his adoring agent (David Johansen from the New York Dolls!). However, he’s not really dead because he re-materialises in the year 2009, surrounded by baddies in bacofoil who are ready to lobotomise him with a freaky laser. Luckily, Furlong escapes into a dystopia where people are either living at the top in sleek, plush surroundings or at the bottom where the only things to eat are rats or soup that’s so tasty that people are willing to kill you if you spill it all over them.

Furlong realises that he’s now a ‘freejack’, a fugitive wanted for his BODY by a mystery party. Everyone he turns to for help either betrays him or slams the door in his face, except for a gun-toting nun, aka Mother Exposition, played by Amanda Plummer a few years before she threatened to execute every motherfuckin’ person in the Big Kahuna burger joint in Pulp Fiction. It turns out there’s a thing called the Spiritual Switchboard, which is a kind of cloud where human minds can be uploaded and then downloaded into a different body. Furlong’s body appears to be hot property because it comes from a time before something called the Ten Year Depression and isn’t contaminated with all the toxins, poisons and mutations that today’s underclass have been exposed to. Ah, but why doesn’t Furlong’s mystery party just take his pick of a body from 2009’s non-toxic cultural elite?

Nope, it’s got to be Furlong, and the one who wants him is none other than Anthony Hopkins, who I forgot to mention in this review so far because he didn’t make much impression on the plot up until now. I’m sure he made an impression on viewers at the time – this was the first film he’d made after his award-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs. This was not the first instance of an actor starring in a total turkey immediately after their Oscar win, and it wouldn’t be the last. It turns out his character in this – the mysterious and recently deceased tycoon McCandless who owns everything in the future and therefore was always untrustworthy – has fallen in love with Julie and of course the only way to win over someone who’s already attached is to possess the body of her boyfriend!

The ending was clearly this was meant to be the Ultimate Trip, the kind that would leave Kubrick whimpering. Forget 2001, this was 2009, baby! This is where Furlong and Julie enter the Spiritual Switchboard, past loads of pixels, squares, time lapse skies and altering environments, culminating in a confrontation with McCandless, who seems to be able to smoke cigars in this virtual world – how does that work? – and who also suspiciously appears to have regretted his rash decision to try and nab Furlong’s body, offering to give everything to him, his riches, his job as an apology … but we know it’s all lies and stalling, as Vacendak shows up and Furlong still ends up undergoing the old switcheroo in a sequence of, and let’s be generous, rather funny special effects that includes a trippy flashback nightmare that, like all bad dream/hallucination sequences, features not one but two random bits of people laughing wickedly.

Weasely deputy villain Michelette (Jonathan Banks), who doesn’t want McCandless in any form to survive as that would prevent him from inheriting the company, destroys the transfer device and we’re all left wondering which mind is currently occupying the disoriented body of Furlong. Michelette has the right idea – if whoever this guy is can correctly identify McCandless’ personal security clearance number then he’s obviously the real deal. The thing is, he actually can! It must be McCandless, god damned McCandless! Michelette shakes his head in despair, laughs to himself and attempts to go out in a blaze of glory before being instantly gunned down by Vacendak.

So Furlong’s dead, right? No. He was just guessing the security number and Vacendak went along with it because, let’s face it, nobody likes Michelette. Furlong’s a bit of a twat about it though, not telling Julie what’s happened until we the viewer also got to find out, which was a bit mean of him, stringing her along like that for what must have felt like a long few minutes. So, Furlong assures Julie that everything’s going to be alright and off they drive. In fact, his specific final line is ‘Come on, buckle up, let’s see what this baby can do!’ which is a line almost as cheesy as the one in this clip:

Cue anthemic metal from whistle-friendly favourites the Scorpions and roll those credits. Terrible ending. Saying that ‘Hit Between the Eyes’ is a fun song. I remember hearing the guitar squeals over that old Sky ad for the movie and I remember thinking this film was going to be ace.

So, what we have here is a film that was probably the last attempt to make Emilio Estevez an action star, but he’s just not well served by the direction or the script. Also, he just doesn’t convey enough of the overwhelmed mind-scramble of what it would be like to be in a new time. Even though the Estevez smirk is almost as good a thing as the Bruce Willis smirk, he’s just too cocky here for us to really care too much. We also have future Breaking Bad legend Jonathan Banks in the role of Michelette, and compared to the dry, been-there-done-that persona of Mike Ehrmentraut, his character here is entertainingly obnoxious, stressed-out and seemingly despised by everybody. The scene where Jagger crushes a Faberge egg and chucks it over to him whilst calling him an asshole is one of the funniest in the film. Banks and Hopkins get the play-it-straight-but-chew-the-scenery-at-the-same-time thing beautifully, which can’t be said for Estevez and Russo. There’s little to no chemistry between the two, which makes their potentially thrilling, 16-year overdue catch-up a little flat. To be fair, the tragedy of their extended separation isn’t helped by the bit just as Furlong ‘dies’ when the camera rapidly zooms into Julie’s face – it’s hilarious. I think even Warners/Morgan Creek realised it was funny as early as 1993, because Brad Pitt’s waster character in True Romance is watching that exact same moment on the telly.

But never mind that.

Let’s talk about Mick Jagger.

Now I’m a huge Rolling Stones fan. I love their sixties stuff, I love their seventies stuff and I even like some of their eighties stuff. And I love Mick Jagger. What a frontman. I mean, there’s precious few like him. Yet there’s always been something kind of hilarious about him too. It’s that preening, camp, lip-smacking sense of mischief, right there even from the start. Like David Bowie, Nicolas Roeg found something intrinsically cinematic about him and both of them enjoyed their best big-screen performances under his wing. However, unlike Bowie, Jagger didn’t really have much of a film career afterwards. I’m not saying Bowie was a screen legend, but he also had The Hunger, Labyrinth and The Prestige among others under his belt, whereas Jagger had few other roles of note. There was Ned Kelly, and then there was Freejack.

I love Jagger in this film – he can’t really act but he does his individual thing and he does it very entertainingly. As I’ve already mentioned, his very first line is a classic of camp delivery, but pretty much everything he says here has this kind of delightful amusement to it. How the hell do nothing lines like ‘power it up’ and ‘he’s good’, both uttered by him in the opening race sequence, end up being so gigglesome? It’s all in the execution. His best extended sequence outside of the Faberge bit is the chase scene involving the ugliest and reddest tank in history. Furlong has escaped in a car/champagne crate and Vacendak and crew are in hot pursuit. Using some kind of bluetooth connection to tap into Furlong’s car, he starts pestering his quarry throughout the car chase, and even though Furlong tries to hang up on him (leading Vacendak to hilariously exclaim ‘Oh no! I hate the dark!’) he just won’t go away. He laughs like a madman, delivers lines like ‘you can’t get rid of me that easily!’ ‘I want him without a scccraaatch!’ and ‘the brake pedal’s the one on the right’ and of course ‘DON’T DO IT!!!!’ with the kind of relish someone who actually gets paid a lot of money to say this stuff does.

So what about the book that Freejack was based on? I wasn’t expecting Robert Sheckley’s 1958 Immortality, Inc. to be so entertaining, but it really is a proper tear-through ride of a novel that is crammed with ideas and twists. Okay, the female characters get short shrift, but for the most part it’s great. To be honest, to adapt it faithfully might have made for a pretty crammed feature-length film, but compromises could nevertheless have been made and we could have got a striking, spectacular SF experience.

When you come down to it, Freejack is mostly a lot of chases, fights and shoot outs, only really going into overdrive (some would say for the worse) for its finale. Immortality, Inc. has a lot more fun delving into the future world that Thomas Blaine (not Alex Furlong) has found himself in. At first his arrival into the future is exploited as a publicity gimmick for the Rex Corporation (there’s no McCandless here) who want to show him off as the world’s first person to be snatched from the past and put in a new body, but is soon forgotten by the media and even his own captors once the novelty’s worn off. Instead of being a target for capture, Blaine is more or less stranded in the future in a new body and with no way to make a living… I don’t want to spoil the rest of the novel as it’s a revelation for those only aware of Freejack, but if you do get round to reading it you’ll be dazzled by how much stuff there is here. Then you think about all that could have been accomplished in adapting this novel and you see what was actually made and released in 1992 and it beggars belief. Freejack essentially adapts a tiny portion of the story – the concept of an old mind occupying a younger body and the presence of the Spiritual Switchboard – and scraps the rest. I mean, there were suicide booths in the novel! Why would you not put something like that in the film? There’s merely a small electronic billboard for ‘suicide assistance’ that you can just about make out in a couple of shots. At least Futurama recognised a great (if fucked-up) SF idea when it saw one. It’s frankly insulting to see what they’ve done to the novel. If there are better examples of just how dumb the worst of Hollywood can be in adapting other mediums, then please let me know.

Of course, there was nothing in Immortality, Inc. that was as funny as the shot below, so both have their own individual merits, I suppose.

PS: Amazingly, one of the co-writers is Dan Gilroy, who would end up directing the terrific Nightcrawler!

PSS: Some of the main characters have alliterative names, like Victor Vacendak and Mark Michelette. Those that don’t are nonetheless played by actors with alliterative names, like Emilio Estevez and Rene Russo. The only exception is Anthony Hopkins as Ian McCandless, but given he had just won an Oscar, I suppose he could get away with it.

PSSS: two non-Jagger highlights from the tank chase scene to mention – the music by Trevor Jones here is really enjoyable, great chase music. And secondly, yes that is a sample of James Brown screaming as a pedestrian jumps out of the way. There’s a few of these in this film, but it wasn’t the first action romp to feature a Brown sample. Raw Deal did it too, spectacularly. Hit me!

PSSSS: Here’s a shot of David Johansen, simply because there hasn’t been one yet in this review.